


Betrayals

by Unsentimentalf



Series: One Small Change [6]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-01-30 16:21:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 33,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21431152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: It's eleven years since the capsule babies were recovered and adopted.  Tarrant, Blake and Avon are settled on Liberator, all political involvement firmly behind them, but when a child starts looking for answers, old problems and new betrayals come with him.
Relationships: Kerr Avon/Del Tarrant, Roj Blake/Del Tarrant
Series: One Small Change [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/457675
Comments: 35
Kudos: 13





	1. One Too Many

The room he was now in was almost identical to the one he'd left. Pale yellow walls and a rather harsh dark blue carpet, a high sealed window that would at times let in welcome beans of sunlight and even the occasional tantalising sight of Earth's glowing moon in its myriad phases. At the moment it was opaque. 

The food dispenser was set in one wall and a large viewscreen in the opposite one, with a desk and chair to one side and a small wardrobe, empty, on the other. Another more comfortable chair faced the screen with a low table in front of it. A side door led to a small bathroom identical to his but with an extra towel on the rail. A control panel set in the wall operated the screen and the room's environmental controls. It could have been a just-above-budget hotel room except for the fact that the ordinary looking door didn't open from the inside. 

The bed was at least twice as wide as his, Tarrant was pleased to note, and there was a rather battered plush sofa jostling the armchair. He dialled himself a coffee and sat down on the sofa to wait for company to arrive. 

A guard came in without knocking, checked around the room and in the bathroom without acknowledging his presence on the sofa, and left again. A few seconds later Avon walked through the door, stopping abruptly when he saw Tarrant. The door closed quietly behind him. 

Avon took in the room with a turn of his head. Tarrant was on his feet, coming round the coffee table.

"You're a sight for sore eyes," he said, smiling. "Come and sit down."

Avon didn't move. "What's going on?"

"They didn't tell you? My legal team's been busy. We now have a court order mandating six hours of unmonitored marital contact time a month."

"Unmonitored?" Avon glanced around. "You don't believe that?"

"I don't actually care." Tarrant took Avon's unresisting hands in his. They were dry and cool as usual. "I don't intend to plot sedition or give away any secrets. It's been a hell of a long four months. They can watch or not as they like." 

Avon was still for a moment, thinking. Then he twisted his hands to grasp Tarrant's wrists. There was a faint smile on his lips. "Bed, then. We can talk later."

Tarrant let himself be pulled in for the kiss before stepping back with reluctance. "There is something else you should know first. "

Avon's eyes narrowed. "Go on."

"The judge ruled that I was only entitled to my six hours a month once, even though I'm married to both of you." 

"So we're alternating?"

"So you're simultaneous. She wasn't very interested in the practical problems this would cause. Apparently this was my problem. I didn't get the impression that she approved of either polymarriage or enemies of the Republic." 

Fingers tightened harder around his wrists. "You're expecting him now?"

Neither of his husbands appreciated prevarications or excuses. "Yes."

"In that case..." Avon turned a little as the door opened again. This time the guard gave them no more than the most cursory glance before backing out to be replaced by Roj Blake.

"Damn! I'm so pleased to see you two!" 

He came forward to throw his arms around both of them. There was an awkward few seconds before Avon let go of Tarrant and he could hug Blake back. Tarrant could happily have held onto his first husband for a very long time but the set of Avon's turned back promised a degree of temper that he really needed to smooth over somehow. With a last squeeze he stepped away. 

Blake didn't seem to mind. "Any idea why we're here?"

Avon spun on his heel to face them. “I gather that Tarrant's been complaining to our captors about his sexual frustration. We're here to satisfy him apparently. The interesting question is what they expect to get from him in return."

"Take no notice of him. His nose is a bit out of joint." Tarrant said to Blake. "A few years ago the Republic gave the majority of long term prisoners the right to unmonitored marital visits. My solicitors took the prison service to court to establish that the rules should apply to us. We have six hours, once a month."

"Oh, well done, Del!" Blake looked delighted. "Send my thanks to your legal team! What's your problem, Avon?"

"Put bluntly, you are." Avon said. "There's one too many people in this room for its intended purpose."

"Ah," Blake looked around. "One of us could have a very long shower, I suppose?"

Avon just looked at him. 

These were the two people Tarrant loved most in the world. Long ago he'd accepted that the responsibility of making this work out was his alone. It was just difficult sometimes.

He recovered his drink from the coffee table and settled in the armchair. It wasn't where he wanted to sit but his first job was not to make this any worse. "We've all got some catching up to do. How about we do that first?"

"That seems eminently sensible. " Blake walked over to the dispenser.

"It seems to me like cowardice," Avon said, but when Blake sat down he did come as far as to lean on the back of the sofa. "Dayna sold us out, of course."

Blake didn't contradict him. Tarrant sighed.

"I was really hoping that one of you would have come up with an alternative theory. I still find it hard to believe that she'd do it."

"She thought that she was protecting Alishia," Blake said. "We shouldn't have assumed that she'd put crew above family."

"She was a fool," Avon said. "She can't keep this secret for long. There are thirty of them out there on the brink of puberty. How long before they start triggering every face recognition system in the Galaxy?"

"If Kai is anything like I was at his age, he won't drop the matter just because the news says I'm in prison." Tarrant said. 

He'd thought about the boy a great deal over the last few months, though all he really knew of him was the five minute message that had triggered this whole crisis, a message that had seemed so innocuous at first.

He'd been watching it on Liberator when Avon had come into their sitting room and glanced up at the screen. 

"Fanmail?"

" I think Orac's got a wire loose. It tagged this as high importance but so far it's just this kid telling me about his flight sim scores. "

"Odd." Avon had settled on the sofa next to him. "Let me see."

The boy- Kai, he'd said his name was - stared earnestly out of the screen. "So Mr Tarrant, could you tell me if you're my real dad please? Because Mum and Dad don't know who it was and everyone says I look like you. And I'm really good at pilot sims."

"Ouch," Tarrant said, leaning back comfortably into Avon's shoulder. "That got intense quick. Poor kid. I guess I'll have to figure out how to let him down nicely."

Avon shifted him sideways and stood up again. "Don't reply yet."

"Why not?"

"Because Orac tagged it high importance. I want to know why."

"Because it spotted that it needed human levels of tact to reply, I would think." Tarrant said.

"Since when did Orac factor the need for tact into anything? Just hold off on replying until I've had a word with it." 

"Yes, boss," Tarrant had said cheerfully. It would take him a while to work out what to say anyway, other than "sorry, kid, but you're most definitely not mine." He'd slept with just two people in the last thirty years and neither of them were capable of getting pregnant.

He'd thought no more about it until the message had come from Avon. "Tarrant. Flight deck, now."

Avon was frequently abrupt but that was short even for him. Tarrant had interrogated Zen as he went, establishing that nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. 

"What's up?" he demanded of Avon. Blake was there too, but from his expression he had no idea what was going on either.

"Zen, put those last two images on screen," Avon said. "Blake. Can you identify them?"

"Of course." Blake said. "That's Del as a child, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

"Both of them?"

"Yes."

Tarrant laughed. "You need your eyesight checking, Roj. The boy in those pictures messaged me a couple of hours ago. Kai, he said his name was."

"You're both half wrong." Avon said. “The image on the left is from security cam footage of Tarrant at 11 years old. The one on the right is a boy called Kai Artlei. He lives on Frais, he celebrated his 11th birthday two weeks ago and he was adopted at five days old, original biological parentage unknown."

"A capsule baby!" Tarrant said in sudden realisation. It was just over 11 years since they'd been taken out of cryogenesis. They'd sent a present to Dayna's daughter for her birthday. "And now the poor kid is looking for his parents. That's rough."

Blake was still staring at the photos. "So we were wrong. Terribly wrong. What do we do now?"

"You might want to wait until our husband catches up," Avon said dryly. "He's particularly slow on the uptake today."

He got there a few seconds later. " He can't be a clone!"

"He can't be anything else, not looking like that." Avon said. 

"It could be chance. It has to be."

"Orac. Based on current observations, what percentage of human -variable genes do Del Tarrant and Kai Artlei share?"

"Lower range is 98.6 percent. No upper range established."

"And how many currently living humans would be likely to share that much genetic material, excluding clones and identical twins?"

"The possible genetic permutations far exceed the human population," Orac said. “Excluding cases of monozygosis and artificially created duplicates, it is highly unlikely that any two human beings have ever shared as much as 98.6% of their variable code."

"So how likely is it that Kai Artlei is a clone of Del Tarrant?" Avon asked. 

"Have you not been listening? It is what humans would regard as a certainty."

"We can't keep this to ourselves," Blake said heavily. "We'll need to trace and tell them all, but first I suppose we need to talk to Dayna."

None of them had imagined at that point that talking to Dayna would end up with all three of them in prison cells.

"After our faithless crewmate teleported us straight into the hold of a Republic warship full of soldiers expecting us, I was taken to Earth on a pursuit ship under heavy guard." Tarrant said. "I had three days under interrogation- arguably the wrong side of legal interrogation at that - until Dareth turned up. " 

He turned to Avon. "He's now the senior partner of the firm of solicitors that I used when Blake and I lived on Earth. Luckily when he heard I'd been arrested he decided that I was still his client. After that his firm was present at all interviews and they were considerably less heavy handed. He even managed to get them to drop some of the charges but I'm still due to appear in court in a couple of weeks time. The charges are mostly variants on treason relating to our work with IndSys and if I'm convicted I'm told the sentence is likely to be substantial."

He shrugged. "That's all my news. What about you two?"

"A very similar story here," Blake said, "I was provided with a defence lawyer after five days on Earth. She is court appointed and rather timid, however - I would guess that the few concessions I've got come from your Dareth's work."

He sighed. "What baffles me is why we've been arrested at all. Relations between the Republic and IndSys have never been better. None of us have had any political involvement for over a decade. If there's some faction behind this I didn't know what they have to gain."

"I'd guess there's no faction behind our arrests, " Avon said. “Just overzealous bureaucracy. These charges were laid years ago. They've been sitting on file waiting to be answered."

"But we've been in and out of the Republic openly dozens of times!" Tarrant protested. "No one's ever tried to arrest us before!"

"It was never feasible before," Avon said. “We had Liberator backing us up. Now Dayna has her, and she wants us silenced so her daughter can grow up without knowing what she is. To have us rotting in a Republican prison for a decade or two will suit her perfectly." 

"Be fair," Blake said, "That teleport could have been into cold vacuum." 

"I don't feel at all inclined to be fair. She's stolen my ship and Orac; when I catch up with her she's going to wish she had killed us when she got the chance."

"Threats or promises, they are all pointless while we're in here," Blake said,"And if they convict us on these trumped up charges that could be for twenty or thirty years."

"For you two, not for me," Avon said. "I've never sworn any oath of loyalty to the Republic. They've given up making treason charges stick and they've very little else except supposition. I imagine that that the only reason I'm still in custody is that they don't like the fuss I might kick up if they release me whilst keeping Tarrant. I don't think they'll hang onto me much past the end of your trials, however those work out."

There was a brief silence at that.

"Good," Tarrant said briskly, to fill it. "At least that's one of you I won't have to worry about." He was pretty sure that none of them were going to speculate further about what Avon might do after being released, not with the chance that they were being recorded. "Roj, I suppose you and I need to compare notes on charges and our defences."

"We ought to do that at some point, yes." Blake twisted round to look at Avon leaning behind him. "But I'm not sure that's really what any of us are here for."

"Don't look at me," Avon said, "I'm here because a guard pointed a stunstick at me. Tarrant's the only one who had anything to do with arranging this delightful little reunion. If he wants to waste the remaining five and a half hours playing amateur lawyer you and I will just have to drink coffee and chat amongst ourselves."

"Wonderful," Tarrant said. "All my fault as usual. Look, I can't do anything about the situation. You're both here and unless you want to come to bed with me together, drinking coffee is all we can do."

That startled both of them, though Avon covered it up fastest. "That's what this is about? You've become bored with just one of us at a time?"

Immediately going on the attack when wrongfooted was one of Avon's least charming characteristics. When it was just the two of them Tarrant handled it, either by deruffling his husband's feathers or by escalating it into a proper row depending on his mood and how unreasonable he thought Avon was being. In front of someone else, however, it was embarrassing. Even Blake. Particularly Blake. 

"Your usual powers of deduction are way off this time, Avon," Blake said pleasantly. "If Del had any active desire for a threesome I'm sure he wouldn't have waited all these years to mention it. I'm sorry Del, but no. I'll go for that long shower if you like but I'm not going to bed with him, not even as a spectator."

"Then forget it," Tarrant said, because he couldn't really say anything else. "I'm just glad to have you here, both of you. Nothing else really matters."

Avon sighed audibly. "I wonder if I can persuade them to take me back to my cell early. I was in the middle of reading a paper on the latest tariel cell developments when I was dragged out here."

Tarrant glared at him. “If you'd rather be on your own, don't let me keep you. After all I can hardly expect you to want to spend time with me while I still have my clothes on."

"Precisely," Avon said. "Do you have a signal for the guard or should I just hammer on the door?"

"Avon!" Blake had got to his feet and was scowling. "There's no call for behaving like that to Del."

"I suggest you look to your own marriage and keep out of mine," Avon retorted. 

"I didn't let him marry you just so you could be an arse to him." Blake said.

"Stop this, both of you!" Tarrant was up and within an arm’s length of both of them. "Look, Blake, I'm sorry we're doing this in front of you but Avon's right. It really is none of your business."

They argued in front of Blake all the time but not about personal things. They didn't argue about personal things anywhere much. Eleven years of marriage and Avon still kept his own counsel about almost everything 

"And as for you," he said to Avon, "You might as well go if you're going to do nothing here except posture in front of Blake."

He thought that maybe Avon would smile slightly and sit down. He thought wrong. 

"Take me back to my cell," Avon said to the guard who responded to his knocks. He stepped outside the room without so much as a backwards glance.


	2. Judgements

Blake stared at the closed door. "Was that my fault?"

"No. It was mine." Tarrant said wearily. "And his, of course. He hates having to do any of this in front of you."

"I understand that," Blake said. "Sometimes I feel the same, though probably for different reasons. I'd never just walk out on you like that after months apart, though."

"You aren't Avon," Tarrant said. "And I'm not going to let you start making comparisons."

Blake sighed. "I honestly thought he cared more about you than that."

"Roj!" Tarrant said sharply. "Just stop! This is the one part of my life that you don't get to involve yourself in."

Blake had his hands on his hips. "I think I have a right to know if he treats you like that regularly."

"You don't," Tarrant said. "No interference - you agreed that when I married him. You had a veto over our relationship right up until you walked me up the aisle, and no further."

"And are you sorry now that I didn't exercise it?" Blake demanded. 

"If I ever decide to get a divorce you'll be the second person to know. I'm not doing this, now or ever, Roj. Please drop it, before I lose my temper."

"I'm not at all happy about this," Blake said stubbornly. 

That was the last straw. "You're unhappy?" He was almost shouting now. "He's gone, Blake! And I can't go after him. It could be months or years until I see him again. It could be never. And you're unhappy about it!"

He wasn't going to walk out on Blake as Avon had done to him. He was too much of an adult to lock himself in the bathroom. There was nowhere else to go so he flung himself face down on the bed and tried to believe that he was feeling more angry than devastated. 

A hand rested on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," Blake said quietly. "Seeing you hurting is the hardest thing. I just want to protect you somehow."

"You weren't helping at all," he said into the pillow.

"I can see that now." 

The mattress dipped as Blake sat down. His fingers were smoothing over the nape of Tarrant's neck. 

"You will let me know if there's anything I can actually do?"

"I don't see how there could be."

They stayed like that in silence for a while. The touch did help a little; Tarrant had been a long time on his own. When Blake finally lay down beside him, he rolled over into his husband's arms and took all the comfort there that he could. 

They had talked over the legal position until there really was no more to say. Their defence, as always, must be that they'd done what was necessary. Whether it would be enough was something neither of them could know.

Now they were curled up together on the sofa, talking about other things. Talking, inevitably, about Avon. Blake was insisting that it was a conversation they needed to have, despite all the years that they'd got by perfectly well not having it.

"I always assumed you'd let me know if you were having problems," he said. "Not about every single row. Just if things weren't working out overall."

"I argue a lot less with him than I do with you." Tarrant pointed out. "He doesn't generally get involved in any of my personal affairs." 

"Is that how you want it?" Blake sounded hurt.

"Oh for... Not with you! I wish you'd understand, Roj! The only thing my marriages to you and to him have in common is the name. Nothing else is the same. How could I possibly be married to anyone else the same way I am to you?"

"And yet you live with him. You sleep with him. You've made a lifelong commitment to be his partner. I watch you two and you're undoubtedly together. You can't tell me that's nothing important."

"I didn't say unimportant," Tarrant insisted. "It's different. Honestly, I thought you'd always understood that."

"I can't imagine any other way of being your husband except to be one hundred percent committed to it," Blake said.

"Well, Avon's found another way. It's all right, Roj, really. I've got you. I really don't need to try to make him my whole world. Things are fine as they are."

"Except that he isn't here." Blake said softly.

Tarrant closed his eyes and was silent for a while. His head was against Blake's shoulder and he could feel the man's steady breathing. 

"You know Avon better than anyone else does, Roj. I don't believe for a moment that you're surprised that he's gone."

"That's not the point," Blake protested. "Just because he's got considerable form when it comes to desertion doesn't make it all right!"

"I knew what he was like when I married him. He never promised me that he'd change and I wouldn't have believed him if he had."

"And that's absolute nonsense!" Blake said. "He's not a child, and he's not acting on some sort of irresistible compulsion. He's just too selfish to care about your feelings. He could behave better any time he wanted to and you really ought to raise your expectations a bit, Del, and stop making excuses for him."

"That's exactly why I don't talk to you about this stuff! He's never going to match up to your standards."

"You make it sound as if my standards are impossibly high! I don't expect much from Kerr Avon, given the number of times that he's let us both down over the years, but not being a complete bastard to my husband for no reason at all - I hardly think that's excessive."

"That’s my call, not yours." Tarrant said, rather tiredly.

"Meaning that you know I'm right."

"Meaning that if you think you've got something vitally important to say about Avon's behaviour maybe you should have the decency to say it to his face and not nag at me about him,"

"Oh have no doubt that I would," Blake said. "If he were only here. I am not interfering because I'm your husband, Del. I'm giving you the best advice I can as a friend. Don't let him tread all over you because he's Avon and always gets away with it. You have the right to better than that."

"I didn't ask for your advice and I really didn't want it." Tarrant said. "Now you've given it to me anyway, can we please drop the subject? There's only a hour until they separate us again."

Blake's arm tightened around him. "All right. I'll say nothing more about it." And rather to Tarrant's surprise, he didn't.

The use of judgement machines had been abolished after the Revolution. Blake had insisted that Republican justice should be entirely transparent even if this made it rather more cumbersome. 

He and Tarrant had already experienced the system once from the defendants' viewpoint, of course, when they'd been tried for the kidnapping of a terrorist. That had been about as high profile as trials got since Blake had still been President, just about, when the offences were committed and Tarrant still Commander. It had been short and reasonably fair, Tarrant had conceded. They'd pleaded guilty with mitigating circumstances and the six months in prison had been more a nuisance than anything else. 

This trial felt as if it would go on forever. The Republic prosecutors seemed determined to bring in as evidence everything they'd done since leaving the Republic, all years and years of it. Their defence counsel challenged most of it as irrelevant and long disputes followed about what could and couldn't be admitted. Tarrant and Blake dutifully stood or sat in the dock together and chatted quietly whenever they got the chance. 

Two weeks had already passed in this way when Tarrant, taking the opportunity to stretch his legs a little in the small dock while the court reassembled itself after lunch, cast his gaze incuriously over the public gallery and saw a very familiar figure sitting at the back.

Blake came to stand beside him. "What's got into you?" he murmured under the noise of the lawyers returning.

"Avon's in the gallery."

"You're kidding!" Blake looked over. "So he is! Well, I guess that answers that then."

Tarrant had been told just before the trial started that his second husband would not stand trial with them but no one had been able to tell him if the man had been released or was being charged separately. 

"Nice of him to drop by, anyway," Blake said quietly, just as the judge fixed them with the scowl they had become all too used to, 

"Silence in the court!" he declared. "The defendants will stand!"

At some point while Tarrant was answering another set of the endless questions about his precise movements fifteen years ago Avon must have left because by the next time he got a chance to look the seat in the gallery was empty. 

The trial dragged on. The prosecution was finally done and it was the turn of their defence and then finally that too was over. Avon hadn't reappeared.

The last day of the trial would be given over to personal statements by the accused. Blake have been working on his speech throughout the trial. The night before, Tarrant was staring at the screen in his cell, still with very little idea of what he wanted to say. 

Their reasons for supporting the seceding systems had been covered over and over again. Both of them had resigned their Republic posts and served their sentences for kidnapping Grear before their first contact with the nascent IndSys. They'd given away no secrets, betrayed nothing and no one. At the most they could just be accused of changing sides and, as Blake contended ferociously, they hadn't even done that. The now independent systems had been as much part of the Republic that Blake had founded as Earth was. The Revolution had split and the Father of the Revolution had taken up the cause of the part that needed him most. 

That was all for Blake to argue, and he'd do it a great deal better than Tarrant would. Everyone knew that Del Tarrant's decisions had always been more about loyalty to his husband than politics. One of his husbands, anyway. The prosecution had seemed genuinely baffled about where Kerr Avon might fit in and Tarrant had made no effort to enlighten them.

Tarrant flicked through the trial notes one more time, trying to find something that he couldn't potentially make worse by talking about tomorrow. There was the gaping hole in the prosecution's case, of course. He'd not only attacked a Republic military ship twelve years ago, kidnapped a Sub Commander and interrogated her, but he'd admitted as much on a general interstellar broadcast. 

Not a word about this incident had been said in the court. No one had mentioned capsules or clones either. It was tempting to raise it himself, just to see what they'd say, but his lawyer had been close to having hysterics at the notion. "At least wait until you're both been acquitted first," he'd insisted.

Tarrant supposed that was good advice. He was heartily sick of this dragging confinement, with nothing but snatched conversation with Blake under the constant scrutiny of the court, apart from their six hours a month which had come round twice more and always went by far too fast. He wouldn't do anything to jeopardise the chance, fairly good as his lawyer saw it, of their release.

He'd say very little tomorrow, he decided. A brief statement about the necessity of his declaration of martial law. Confirmation of his support of Blake's commitment to the seceding systems. The attempt on his life at the Presidential Palace and his complete withdrawal from public life in accordance with the subsequent peace accords. Everything else, except for those unmentionable dealings with Lente, he'd done alongside Blake and his husband could speak for both of them.

The public gallery had been half empty for the past few weeks. For those interested in the trial there was a live broadcast with expert commentary. For those who wanted to come and stare at the defendants in person there had been ample opportunity already and two middle aged men answering questions had proved rather unexciting.

Today it was packed and Dareth had told Tarrant that there was a long queue outside. Apparently, the prospect of a speech from Blake could still pull in the crowds. 

Ten years as Commander of the Republic's forces had thoroughly accustomed Tarrant to public speaking. He was first to address the jury, doing so without notes and with a deliberate air of fairly relaxed confidence, but he was thoroughly glad when it was done and he could sit down. 

Blake patted him on the arm as he passed, breaching for once the court room's strict no touching rule. "Well done," he said softly. "Avon's here."

Tarrant had to resist the temptation to stand up again and look. He'd given up expecting Avon to return. There had been not a word from the man throughout the trial and Dareth hadn't managed to track down any contact details for correspondence. Avon could have visited his husband, but he hadn't. He could have written, but he hadn't. Apart from that one brief glimpse of him in the gallery two months ago Tarrant had been entirely abandoned, and he had started to think about talking to Dareth about the unpleasant inevitability of getting divorce papers finalised once the trial was done. It seemed the least that Blake's faithfulness deserved. 

He couldn't see much of the public gallery from where he was sitting at the back of the dock. Blake couldn't be wrong, though. The court was being silenced again now, so that Blake could start his address. Why would Avon come today? Mere curiosity? Maybe he wanted to know if any of Liberator's secrets would be revealed. 

There was no telling without at least seeing him and Tarrant had to stop craning his neck over the edge of the dock because Blake was starting to speak.

It had been a very long time since Blake had made one of his real state of the galaxy speeches; probably not since his Presidential days. He'd been heavily involved in IndSys politics of course but in those rather awkward circumstances he'd always declared himself an advisor, not leader. 

He'd always liked making them though, talking about the broad sweep of politics, the principles and the struggles. Blake could quite easily stay on his feet lecturing for several hours and it was a basic tenet of Republic justice that the final statement by the defendant was allowed for as long as they were able to deliver it, regardless of length or indeed relevance, so Tarrant wasn't entirely surprised to hear this particular speech start all the way back with Blake's Federation trial on Earth. 

Blake had spent months quietly watching the members of the jury and their reactions to the evidence. There was some doubt about how much final statements were generally able to sway jurors but Tarrant had genuine hope in his husband's ability to persuade most of them to see thing his way. He sat up and watched Blake, making certain that he looked interested, impressed and supportive. He didn't try again to see who might be in the public gallery. 

At the end of that long day the court was suspended until the jury reached a verdict. There had been a large number of charges and a huge amount of evidence to review so Tarrant had been warned by Dareth not to expect any decisions soon. 

He sat in his room drinking coffee and trying not to think too hard about the possibility of imminent release. It was likely, he supposed, that they'd be found guilty on at least some if the charges, even if not the major ones, and that could mean a further spell in prison, hopefully short. He probably wasn't going anywhere tomorrow. He couldn't help wishing though. 

Three days later he was not so much wishing as worrying. How could they be taking so long?

A knock was a welcome distraction from his thoughts. A guard came in, performed the usual pre-visitor check and stepped out again. That was odd- Dareth had already been and gone this day. Tarrant got to his feet to face the door, mood rising. Maybe this was the call back to the courtroom for the verdict at last.

When Avon stepped through the door he was too startled for a moment to say anything at all.


	3. Coming and Going

"Where have you been?"

Avon shrugged. "Does it matter?" He walked over to the dispenser to get himself a drink.

"I thought there might be a reason for your extended absence." 

"There is," Avon said with his back to Tarrant. "But it's got nothing to do with where I've been."

"So what was it?"

"I don't like engaging in monitored conversations."

"We're being monitored now."

"Not for the next few minutes. It's changeover. They’ll take a while to notice the sound's gone down and they'll need to come in here to fix it. Stand by me and they won't be able to lip read."

Tarrant re-orientated himself. Avon was close enough to touch, if he'd wanted to. "So what have you got to say?"

"The jury deliberations are going badly, as you might have guessed. The longer they go on, the more the impact of Blake's eloquence fades." 

There was a pause, during which Tarrant didn't bother asking how he could possibly know. "I might be able to get you out," Avon continued.

"Blake as well?"

"Just one of you this time."

"Then no, thank you."

"He doesn't benefit at all from your captivity."

"If I go on the run I won't ever be able to visit him." Tarrant said.

"You'll put up with years in prison for the sake of six hours a month with him?"

"Of course." 

"Illogical as that is, I somehow suspected that you'd say that. Never mind, then." Avon sipped at the drink. "Is there anything else you'd like to know about the world outside before I leave?"

"I'd like to know if you're intending to come back." Tarrant said. "And if not, where my solicitor can serve the divorce papers."

Avon turned to look at him. “You'd divorce me?" He sounded genuinely surprised.

"Why shouldn't I? You walked out on me months ago and I haven't had a word from you since. Hell knows that I've never expected a great deal of commitment from you but if I'm going to get nothing at all there's no point in keeping up the pretence." 

"I came when I had something useful to offer." Avon said. He sounded genuinely bewildered. 

"But you did walk out!"

"One of us had to, given your screw-up. I could have argued the toss with Blake but instead I left him in possession of both you and the bed. A little gratitude might have been in order, from him at least if not from you."

Tarrant was shaking his head. That was surely not what had happened. "Not a word since, Avon. Not a message, not a visit."

"You wanted me to stop by just to hold your hand? Come on, Commander. You're a great deal tougher than that."

"You could have come," Tarrant insisted. "It wouldn't have been any trouble for you."

"You think not? "Avon stepped behind him, wrapping his arms around Tarrant's waist. His voice had lowered close to the other man's ear. "Six hours a month may be sufficient for Blake but it's not anything like enough for me. I wasn't going to torment myself so we could make polite conversation in from of the camera. I knew that when I saw you I'd want to throw you onto that bed and fuck you, not talk."

Tarrant could feel the hardness of the man's erection up against his rear end. Before he could react the door opened.

"No physical contact is permitted," the guard said. Her stun stick was humming. "Stand away from him."

Avon stepped aside. "So much for visiting," he told Tarrant. The guard had remained in the room and was watching them closely. "If you insist on serving those papers I won't contest it. When I can, I'll let your solicitor have a forwarding address. Goodbye."

Tarrant had expected to be led back to the courtroom for the verdict. Instead he was in a brightly lit interview room and he had no idea why.

“Where is your husband?” the lead interrogator demanded abruptly.

“I don’t know,” Tarrant said honestly. “He hasn’t told me anything about where he is or what he’s doing. What’s Avon supposed to have done?”

“Not Kerr Avon,” the second woman said. “Roj Blake.”

“Blake? You can’t have lost him out of a prison cell, surely?”

“Did he tell you that he was going to escape?”

“Blake? No! He was convinced that we were going to be acquitted. Why would he run now?”

They considered him for a moment.

“Kerr Avon,” the first said. “He visited you last night.”

“We’re married. He does make an appearance occasionally.” 

“What did he say?”

“I thought the cells were all monitored,” Tarrant said. “Can’t you check your records?”

“Just answer the question”.

“All right. If you must know, we had a short disagreement about the fact that he couldn’t be arsed to visit before, and I told him that I was considering getting a divorce. Your records should show that he only stayed a few minutes.”

“Did Kerr Avon say that he intended to visit Blake yesterday evening?”

Tarrant shook his head. “Did he visit Blake?”

“Yes,” the second woman said. “Did he tell you that he was going to help Blake escape?”

“No. he didn’t. And to be honest that doesn’t seem particularly likely to me. They aren’t really that fond of each other.” 

“Did you discuss Roj Blake with him at all?”

“I suppose he might have been mentioned in passing. He often is.”

“So you’re claiming that you don’t know what either of your husbands were up to last night?”

“I was locked up at the time,” Tarrant pointed out. “The last time I saw Blake was four days ago and my last conversation with Avon wasn’t particularly informative. How did Blake get out?” 

It turned out that there had been a holographic projection involved, which as far as Tarrant was concerned meant that it really had been Avon’s doing. 

After a couple of hours of questions he was returned to his cell, where he sat back and wondered what he should make of it all. He’d turned down Avon’s offer so he could share prison with Blake, who had apparently decided not to hang around for him. Neither Avon nor Blake seemed to have made any attempt to hide their involvement, which presumably meant that neither of them would be persona grata in the Republic from now on. So he was on his own. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d been well and truly screwed over by both of them. Avon, he might have expected, but how Blake had been persuaded into this he really couldn’t imagine.

Later that day he was escorted down to the courtroom where he stood in the dock and impassively listened to the verdicts and the sentence. The location of the high security prison in which he was to serve out eight years would remain a military secret. He couldn’t really bring himself to care. Blake was sentenced in absentia for fifteen years.


	4. Heart Break

"Hey, Commander! Your husband's on screen!"

Tarrant had just emerged from the unheated shower. He broke into a dash to the communal screen room.

There was Blake talking to the camera and a smaller figure beside him. 

"That your kid, Commander?" someone asked 

"Not really. Turn it up, will you?"

"The Republican government created clone babies and sent them into space." Blake was saying. "Hundreds were deliberately killed. This is Kai. He's one of the lucky ones. He was rescued by Liberator and given a loving home by the people of IndSys. As many of you will be able to tell just by looking at him, he's a clone of my husband Del Tarrant."

"You got a clone, Comm? That's weird." someone else said.

"Shut up. I'm listening."

"It's because of these children that I..."

The screen went blank. 

"Get it back!" Tarrant demanded but the incoming broadcast had been cut by the guard centre and there was nothing he could do. 

He spent a lot of time when he had the chance over the next few days thinking. Blake had broken into the Republic broadcast system - did that mean he had Liberator back, or had Avon found another way to do it? What was he doing with Kai? Was it the clones that Avon had used to persuade Blake to escape, and the old question- why would Avon want to spring Blake out of prison anyway?

Whatever his husbands were doing, they were doing it without him. The tedious round of work, eat and sleep in the prison camp continued without alteration. He was almost grateful for the long days of gratuitously hard physical labour- at least he slept at night rather than lying awake fretting. 

Conditions in the Saturn camp had come as an unpleasant surprise. As President, Blake had shown a keen interest in the Republican prison service, something that Tarrant had benefited from when he spent his first dull but not uncomfortable six months in custody. The Earth remand cells that he'd been in up to the end of his latest trial had been equally unobjectionable. 

On Saturn they didn't believe in coddling criminals, the young and stern Superintendent had informed him on arrival, even if the prisoner happened to be ex-Commander of the Republic military. He must understand discipline and risk - well, if he kept his head down and did what he was told then a man of his age and general fitness had better than a ninety percent chance of walking onto the shuttle home in eight years’ time. If he made trouble -well, he might never see Earth again.

Tarrant had pointed out that he didn't particularly want to see Earth again. As far as he could see the Republic was now nearly as corrupt as the Federation had been and he greatly regretted risking his life so often for a bunch of dictatorial ingrates with nothing on their mind but harassing their own citizens and warmongering against their neighbours. As for the Superintendent, if she thought he was going to keep his head down and behave, she clearly hadn't been paying attention in her Revolutionary History lessons at school. 

It had at least been a useful introduction to the camp's disciplinary methods. 

Thirty years ago he'd have made himself the bane of the guards' lives, and he was tempted to do just that, but he wasn't young any more. If they starved him for five days straight too often he'd get really sick and he had no intention of dying here. So he let most of it go and only kicked back when he really couldn't stand it any more. Even that was often enough to have him marked down as a leading troublemaker. There wasn't much rebellion in this camp.

"General inspection!" the loudspeakers announced. "Fall in for inspection immediately."

Tarrant looked down at the stew he'd just collected at the hatch. He knew from experience that there wouldn't be any more issued tonight for any reason. Around him the others were making their way out to the parade ground. Sod it. He was not going to bed hungry tonight. They could wait five minutes.

Four minutes later he strolled, at a reasonable but not hurried pace, out to the ranks of prisoners. The inspection party had stopped and was considering the gap in the line. Tarrant slid neatly into the space and nodded civilly at the Superintendent.

"Ah, Del Tarrant at last," the elderly man with her said. "And I see that you've granted him special privileges. Would you like to explain why, Superintendent?"

"She hasn't," Tarrant explained helpfully. "I'm just not that good at following the rules. Who are you, by the way?"

The man fixed him with a stony look. "This man needs to be disciplined."

"And he will be, I assure you," the Superintendent said hurriedly. 

"Now," the man said. "He's demonstrated disobedience in front of all his fellow prisoners and now we must demonstrate the consequences. Tie him up and flog him."

"We aren't authorised to conduct corporal punishment," the Superintendent protested. "The prison regulations expressly forbid it."

"This is on my authorisation."

Tarrant frowned at him. "Should I know who you are? Apart from an unpleasant sadist, obviously."

"Your husbands are causing trouble." The man had leaned forward to speak to Tarrant alone. "Unwise of them when we have you. I intend to send them a message. Fortunately your juvenile antics here have provided a perfect pretext."

He stepped back. "Seize him."

There were voices. Tarrant couldn't be bothered to listen but they cut through the fuzz in his head anyway. 

"How is he?"

"It's been touch and go." The second voice sounded annoyed. "This man was a full ten percent below minimum acceptable weight when he was admitted. Your people have been regularly starving him without getting the mandatory health checks done. And as for the lashes- there are protocols for a reason, you know, A full check-up first would have found the problem with his heart." 

Tarrant had thought they were talking about him, but there wasn't anything wrong with his heart. He was just very tired indeed, too tired to open his eyes. 

"But how is he? Will he live?"

"For now, probably. But how long he'll survive in the general camp I couldn't say. Even if you reduce his workload and stop starving him, I wouldn't give much for his chances."

"He has to survive." That was the Superintendent. Tarrant recognised the voice now. "I've been told that it is critical that he stays alive."

"Then I suggest you get him transferred," the doctor said. "These are no conditions for a man in fragile health, and thanks to your heavy handed VIP this one is going to be convalescent for a long time."

Tarrant greeted the news of his upcoming transfer back to Earth with indifference. It would still be captivity, and unlikely to be out of the reach of the man who'd wanted to send that message and might choose to send another.

As the date approached, however he started to consider it as an opportunity. If they thought of him as an invalid they might send him with a limited guard, and he didn't need to be 100% to fly a shuttle. 

He kept to the hospice, pottering from bed to chair wrapped up in a blanket. It was all too easy to counterfeit weakness and he worried that his body might let him down when he needed it. He'd been told that his heart was getting stronger now and provided he took his medication and avoided stress he might stay free from further attacks but since avoiding stress and escaping seemed to be mutually exclusive this wasn't much comfort. 

His back was mostly healed now, though when he stood abruptly or reached out the damaged muscles still protested sharply. He was still given painkillers and hid most of them against future need. Enough of them would knock a man unconscious, if he could deliver them somehow. 

He didn't think much about what had happened because it was a bleak memory and there was nothing to gain from remembering. He didn't wonder, either, what Blake and Avon might have done to spur such a response. He'd mostly stopped thinking about them at all. Any sort of love, faithful or faithless, seemed too distant to be part of his life any more, They were not here and he was. 

The shuttle was a little Zircon model, one of the old workhorses of the Republican military fleet, with a standard crew of two and room for three passengers. To Tarrant's satisfaction they were sending a medic with him, which meant just the one guard. Armed, of course, while he was in cuffs, and there would be the pilots to deal with, but still it was a real chance. 

He was helped carefully aboard to sit between the medic and the guard, whose gun, he noted, fired anaesthetic darts. That made sense. You wouldn't use a stunner on a man with heart problems.

Tarrant sat with his head tipped back and his eyes closed while his blood pressure was checked yet again before takeoff. He didn't bother with one last look at the Saturn camp. He was only interested in what opportunities he could make in the next ten hours or so. 

He was clutching a small bag with his multiple medications in it. He'd carefully replaced the contents of one of the sachets with the ground up painkillers and resealed it.

His opportunity came around three hours into the flight. The guard had helped himself to a coffee.

"Can I have some water?" Tarrant asked, in a slightly faltering voice. “I need to take my meds."

The guard looked over at the medic who nodded. Tarrant fumbled awkwardly with the sachet in his cuffed hands and finally managed to tear the end off, dropping it in the process. As he picked it up he concealed most of the contents in his left fist and poured the remains into the glass. 

He sipped at that for a couple of minutes, letting everything settle down again. Then he started retching abruptly, flinging his hands around in distress. It was remarkably easy to plant the rest of the drugs into the guard's coffee in the process. Twenty minutes later the man was fast asleep despite the medic's best efforts to wake him. 

"Stay here" the medic told Tarrant. 

He was tempted to point out that he'd didn't have much choice, being still cuffed to the chair, but he just nodded weakly. As the medic stood up to hammer on the door between them and the pilots, Tarrant knew that this was his only chance to get the gun from the comatose guard. This was the tricky bit. If the pilots were armed he'd have little chance. 

The pilots weren't responding quickly. The medic hammered on the door again and Tarrant flung himself sideways, managing to get one hand on the holster. 

"Hey!" The medic had turned back. "I said stay where you are!"

Tarrant struggled to pull the gun out of the holster but it was stuck somehow. He had no time left - the pilots' hatch was opening and a gun was pointed at him, a real one this time. Shit. He let go of the holster. 

The gun swung round and fired. The medic crumpled. 

"Nice try," Avon said. "But you could have left it to us. We had it all in hand. You look like hell, by the way."

He came through the hatch to search the guard for the handcuff control. "Did you intend to leave this one alive?"

"Not particularly," Tarrant said, "I didn't have enough drugs to kill him with. You took your time coming to get me."

Avon uncuffed him and cuffed the guard up instead. "We couldn't find you," he said. "The Republic's got a lot of prisons these days and rumour had you still on Earth. Fortunately someone was eventually kind enough to send us a video."

"Us?" He glanced at the open hatch. "Please tell me there's a real pilot flying this thing."

"I heard that!" Blake called back. "I'm doing just fine."

"You'd better let me up there." Tarrant said to Avon, "We could have ships on our tail at any minute. "

"You don't look up to it," Avon said.

"This is camouflage, mostly."

"It's the not mostly bit that concerns me. Go on, you can fly her, but I'm sitting co pilot in case you pass out."

Tarrant clambered into the empty front seat. A hand rested on his arm.

"Are you OK, Del?" Blake asked.

There wasn't any immediate answer to that. He flicked the switch to take control of the shuttle. "Are these co-ordinates where we're going?"

"Yes." Blake's hand lifted away. 

"We can't fly there directly. Our diversion will be spotted any minute now. We've got enough fuel to take her through Uranus's rings. Avon, I could do with you up here now." Avon was a more than halfway decent pilot. Blake was adequate provided no one was shooting at them. 

Avon made no attempt to distract him from anything but flying, for which Tarrant was grateful. He was running on little except adrenaline and he couldn't crash yet. The opposition had turned up about when he expected it and there had been a distinctly hairy chase to Uranus before he could dip dangerously close to the rings and hide. Now his main job was to keep the shuttle from being wiped out by one of the millions of spinning rocks while Avon monitored the two pursuit ships still hunting for them. 

"Go now," Avon said, and they went, at top speed.


	5. Salvation

"Tarrant. Wake up, Tarrant."

Someone was shaking him. He moaned a small protest and closed his eyes tighter.

"Come on, Del. Please, Just a couple of minutes."

Why wouldn't they leave him alone? He felt so tired.

"Come on. Just one minute." Pillows were being propped up behind him now, so that his head came up. He felt as if he was going to pass out. His heart was pounding. Didn't they know he was ill?

"Open your eyes for me, Del. One quick word and you can go back to sleep."

Why was Blake bullying him? It would serve the man right if he died. He gave in, dragged his eyes open and struggled to focus on the room. There was a screen and someone on it. 

Dayna, he thought, but he didn't have the energy to speak.

"You're using him!"

"I wouldn't do that," Blake said.

"You would. There's no one you wouldn't use, Roj Blake, not even him."

"You can see him for yourself," Blake said. "You're got the read outs. All I'm asking is that you let him live."

Tarrant had closed his eyes again and was already drifting back to unconsciousness. 

He woke where he should be, in his own bed, with the hum of the ship around him. Something was odd about being here and for a second he wondered if he'd come to bed with the wrong man. Was it Avon's week? Blake wouldn't let him make that mistake, surely. 

The past year came back to him in a single horrified rush of knowledge. He'd been ill, really ill - he sat up in bed. There was no dizziness and he couldn't feel his heart pounding. He stretched upwards and his muscles responded smoothly and without pain. When he reached behind him to the skin of his back the familiar ridged scar tissue was gone. 

"Zen." he said to the empty space. "How long have I been aboard Liberator?"

"Five days and seven hours," Zen replied promptly. 

"How long was I in the med unit?" 

"Four days and thirteen hours."

That was an almost unprecedented length of time. He’d not been in the unit much longer than that when Avon had shot him. Had killed him.

Maybe the med unit had fixed his heart while it mended skin and muscle tissue. Could survival really turn out to be that easy? 

"Zen, where's Blake?”

"Roj Blake is not on board"

"Avon?"

"Kerr Avon is not on board. There is a message from Dayna Mellanby."

"Play message."

"I'm guessing you're feeling better if you're starting to ask questions. I'll meet you in the galley for breakfast in twenty minutes."

Tarrant realised that he was extremely hungry. He was no longer obviously gaunt from starvation and illness but his stomach seemed to know that he'd eaten nothing for days. 

He took a quick shower, taking immense pleasure in the painless pounding of the hot water against his skin, and dressed, finding all his old clothes hung distinctly loose on him. 

Walking down to the galley, he wondered how he ought to be feeling about Dayna. She'd betrayed them to the Republic, which he supposed made her responsible for everything that had happened to him, but without the med unit he suspected that he might be dying slowly rather than feeling positively euphoric. Maybe best to reserve judgement until he heard what she had to say. 

The table was laden with food- solid food, with taste, texture and aroma. For several minutes he ignored Dayna in favour of eating. Finally he pushed away an empty plate. 

"That's quite possibly the best meal I've ever had. It beats all those presidential banquets hands down."

"Zen said you'd be hungry," Dayna moved the plate and came to sit opposite him. 

"Is anyone else on board?"

"Frech is keeping an eye on everything. The children are at their Iessons."

"Your family are living here?"

"Since Blake told the world about cloning it's not safe to leave them on planet any more." She sounded bitter. 

"No one intended any harm to Alishia. Blake was doing what he thought was right for the children," he said, because he felt that he ought to.

"Have you met Kai yet?" she demanded, 

"No."

"You will, soon enough. Blake keeps dragging him around like a mascot. The poor kid thinks you're going to adopt him. I've met his parents- his real parents, the ones who've cared for him since he was a few days old. They are distraught that he keeps being taken away and then dumped back with them but they are just ordinary people -what can they say to their son to set against the heady promise of having Roj Blake and Del Tarrant as his new daddies?"

"I'm not up to speed with what Blake or anyone else is doing." Tarrant sat back. "I've been stuck in a prison camp getting starved and beaten. The others couldn't find me, apparently, I imagine that with Orac and Zen you could have done quite easily if you'd wanted to," 

"I had my family to look out for. You're not my responsibility any more."

He thought she sounded defensive. "You put me in the hands of the Republic. I think you know what your responsibility was."

"I let you use the med unit. You’re alive and well. Now I want you off my ship," she said. "I'm going to put you down somewhere safe. I'll let Blake know the co-ordinates; he should reach you in a couple of days."

Tarrant didn’t want to leave Liberator and he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to see Blake right now.

“I’ll go wherever you want me to go,” he said. “Just let me get about ten hours more sleep and a chance to interrogate the med unit first. I would like to know whether I’m still likely to suddenly drop dead of heart failure or not.”

The dockside inn was pleasant enough- reasonable food, a decent mattress and some civil games of poker in the bar. For someone recently out of a prison camp it was luxury.

It also had a wide range of alcohol and other drugs. There had never been any spare food in the camp but there had been illicitly brewed booze, and Tarrant had found that drinking eased the hunger pangs a little. He’d abandoned his decades-long abstinence without a qualm; he’d done it to support Blake but wherever either of his husbands might have been at the time he had bet that they weren’t chronically famished. 

He didn’t have any excuse now, but he still wanted a drink. He didn’t want a coffee, a fruit juice, soda or a glass of water. He wanted something with a kick in it which would help him through a two day wait with nothing to do. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that his abstinence mattered, not any more. He wasn’t even sure what might matter to him apart from his ship. The ranked bottles shone down on him from behind the bar. In the end he decided against, for no better reason than that to have a drink felt a little like a decision and he wasn’t ready for decisions yet. 

He was looking at the first hand of decent cards in over half an hour when he heard the familiar distant roar of the racer’s engines coming into dock. Tarrant threw in his cards and chips and went to collect his luggage. 

At the dock office he could see the back of a grey haired older man talking to the woman at the counter. Tarrant stood just outside the door so he could keep an eye for anyone coming down the docks. It was not until the man finished his transaction and turned around that Tarrant realised it was Avon. 

They looked at each other for a moment. Tarrant thought that maybe he was expected to greet the man with some show of physical affection, but he didn’t. Avon walked over to pick up one of the cases. 

“All fixed up?” 

“Apparently,” Tarrant said, falling into step beside him. 

“You’re certainly looking a lot better. How’s my ship?” 

“You’ll be able to see for yourself, soon enough. Remember Alpha Omega Seven?” 

Avon almost dropped the bag. “You didn’t! But doesn’t Dayna know about that?” 

“I modified it some time ago. Different command, different release sequence, but it does pretty much the same thing. The ship switches to automatics and goes back to her previous location.” 

"And you didn’t tell me.” 

“I decided that you didn’t need to know. The failsafe should cut in 48 hours after Liberator sent you a message, so the ship will be shutting down in about three hours.” 

The bags were loaded in silence and Avon sent a bland message to their ship confirming pick up and returning. “They are only in a low orbit,” he said. “You won’t have to put up with my company for more than a few minutes.” 

It was unlike Avon to be self-depreciating. Tarrant thought about the comment for the rest of the short trip. He wasn’t sure that he wanted anyone’s company right now, not Avon, not Blake, certainly not the child. The only thing he was certain of was that he wanted Liberator back. He wanted to be home.


	6. Disagreements

Blake looked dismayed rather than delighted at the news about Liberator. “I gave my word to Dayna that you’d do nothing underhand whilst you were on the ship.”

“Maybe you should have told me that,” Tarrant said. “Better still, maybe you shouldn’t have taken it upon yourself to speak for me at all.”

“It was the only way I could persuade her to have you aboard.” Blake said. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to send her the release code.”

“No,” Tarrant swung his leg over the edge of the flight deck seat to sit down. It felt good to be able to move without pain. "She’s no right to that ship and I’m taking it back.”

"She did save your life."

"Crap. Liberator saved my life and I'm returning the favour by liberating her from a thief. Dayna doesn't need her and has no right to her. She's my home." 

"She's my legal property." Avon had been quiet until then, sitting at the comms unit.

"And what are you going to do about it?" Tarrant asked.

"Recover her, I imagine, since we seem to have an opportunity to do so."

"Avon!" Blake said sharply. "You gave your word to Dayna too!"

"If I hadn't, Tarrant could have been dead by now," Avon said. "It was quite a strong incentive to lie convincingly." 

"My word has to be worth something!" Blake insisted to Tarrant,

"Does it? I'm afraid I've been a bit out of practice when it comes to idealism lately. There wasn't much call for it on Saturn."

Blake had his solemnly concerned face on. "You're in no state to do anything right now. When you're feeling back to your old self, then we can discuss what to do about Liberator." 

"I'm fully fit, thank you. The med unit confirms it."

"I wasn't talking about physically. You're treating us both like strangers and you're acting as if the ship's more important to you than anything else."

"Because it is," Tarrant said. "I don't know what I think about either of you two right now but I know that I need Liberator. You don't have to be part of this, Blake. Avon and I can do it by ourselves. You might want to think about moving your possessions out of here afterwards though, and the child’s too, if his stuff’s on board. I wasn't planning to leave Dayna's family homeless."

"His name's Kai," Blake said. "You can't ignore his existence forever."

"I'm not going to play happy families for him either," Tarrant said. "When we've got the ship back you can tell me what on Earth you think you're doing with him and then I'll decide if I want to be involved."

An alert interrupted them. "Message from Liberator." Avon was at the comms. "Shall I put her through?"

"Wait a sec," Tarrant said. "I mean this, Roj. I am not returning control of that ship to Dayna under any circumstances. I don't wish her any harm but you made a promise under duress that I don't feel at all obliged to keep and I intend to tell her so. She cost me a particularly unpleasant year of my life and quite possibly the two loves of my life and she doesn't now get to deprive me of the only real home that I've ever had. You can stay here and protest or you can leave the flight deck and let me get on with it. The end result is going to be exactly the same."

"This isn't going to help." Blake said softly. "The things that are hurting you - throwing your weight around won't fix any of them. Let Liberator alone and talk to the people who love you instead."

"You're wrong," Tarrant said. "A chat might make you feel better but I somehow doubt that it will improve my mood nearly as much as reacquiring a huge alien warship capable of destroying large parts of the Republican penitentiary system on my command. I'm doing this now, Blake. We can talk later. Put her through, Avon."

Dayna's fury was volcanic but futile. Tarrant had made a few other minor changes to Liberator's systems before they were locked down; the ambient temperature was now a chilly 14 degrees, the showers didn't work, the extensive games systems would play only chess at grand master level and the food dispensers produced nothing but a highly nutritious cold porridge. No twelve year old could be expected to tolerate any of this and Dayna had two of them. She was off the ship in under ten hours.

"Satisfied?"

Tarrant looked up from the pilot's console. "Entirely, thank you."

"When you're done there we could check out the state of our quarters," Avon suggested.

"No thanks. You can do that on your own."

"Are you sure? You look like you need some down time and there's nothing pressing going on here."

Tarrant sighed. "I did say I'd talk to Blake."

"That sounds like an excuse."

"Just give me a bit of time." Tarrant tried not to sound irritable.

"You never needed time before."

"You both keep acting as if nothing at all has changed!" He was getting annoyed. Couldn't Avon leave him to commune with his ship for ten minutes?"

"That's because the only thing that's changed is you," Avon said. "Shall I tell Blake that you'll be moving into spare quarters?"

"Tell him what you like," Tarrant snapped. "Can't you see that I'm busy?"

"What are you up to?"

Tarrant glanced up at Blake then back to the screen. "Reviewing all the uses of camouflage while we've been away. I'd like to know which of our aliases have been active and what they've done."

"Good thinking," Blake said. "But if you're doing that then I'd guess that there's nothing more urgent that you need to do tonight. Leave that till tomorrow and come off shift."

"It's important. I'd rather do it now,"

"Of course you would." Blake said. "I imagine that's the plan. Work till you're too tired to do anything but crash, then get up tomorrow and find another day's worth of things to do that you can claim are more important than talking to either of us. You’re worrying me, Del. However bad things got, I've never known you try to hide from reality before."

Was that what he was doing? He used to trust Blake's opinion on things like that. 

"I don't want to talk to either of you." 

"Thirty years," Blake said. "We've always talked. About the Revolution. About Saturn. About martial law. About leaving the Republic. When you fell in love with someone else, we talked about it. How much more difficult can this be?" 

Tarrant closed down the console. "I guess I've always needed to put things right between us before."

Blake's face froze. "That bad?"

"Yes," he said, because he'd realised that it was.

"Avon too?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"Well," Blake said heavily. "That explains a lot. I suppose this is what you don't want to talk about."

"Not really, no."

"I suppose that it’s a perfectly understandable reaction to extreme stress."

"I don’t think it matters what it might be a reaction to," Tarrant said. "It just is." 

"It matters a great deal to me," Blake said. "You went through hell in that place. If it's left you too numb to function for now I'm not going to ask anything at all from you. I just want to be there for you. I'm sure Avon feels the same.”

That made Tarrant laugh, which made Blake frown even more. "Want to tell me why that's funny?"

"Just the idea of you two being there for me," Tarrant stepped away from the console. "As I said, I don’t want to talk. I'll see you in the morning."

Tarrant knocked on the door and opened it. He’d been hoping that Avon might be out but he could see the man propping himself up in bed.

“I’ve just come for some clothes. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.”

“You aren’t in my way,” Avon said. “At least say good morning.”

Tarrant felt a little uncomfortable. “Sorry. Morning. I don’t really want to stop and chat.”

“So Blake said last night.” Avon slid naked out of bed and wrapped his dressing gown around himself. “When did you last have sex?”

“Don’t start,” Tarrant said. 

“It’s a question, not a proposition. When my husband has been absent for over a year, I think it’s reasonable to be a little curious.”

Tarrant found the underwear he’d been looking for. He wasn’t going to be coy in front of Avon. He was used to lacking any privacy.

“Not since Blake left me. It’s been remarkably easy to remain faithful to you, particularly after the malnutrition started to kick in. I can’t recall the last time I even had an erection.” 

“Ah yes,” Avon said. “I remember now. Tarrant’s terrible trauma. I’m meant to tiptoe around the subject sympathetically for the next few months while you maintain your self-righteous glow by making digs about how it’s all our fault. Blake, as I have said many times, is an idiot.” 

If Tarrant had been wearing anything but underpants he’d have stormed out. Since doing so with any dignity was out of the question he pretended he hadn’t heard instead. He pulled a plain brown tunic out of his wardrobe. He wasn’t feeling like dressing up for this audience. 

“I didn’t know your wardrobe even held anything that could be described as drab,” Avon was dressing now too. Leather was ridiculous on someone his age, really. “I hope you’re not going to make a habit of it. If we both have to put up with you being sulkily celibate you could at least give us something worth looking at.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“You are. You may think you’re dealing with your problems in a dignified adult fashion but from here I assure you it looks like pure petulance.” 

Tarrant’s trousers slid unexpectedly easily over his thighs. How much weight had he lost, he wondered, and would it go back on? “I don’t care enough about your opinion to play your games. Think what you like.”

He picked up his boots and left.


	7. Moving Out

The flight deck was back as it should be. Tarrant had run all the tests and got all the reports that he wanted. 

"She’s ready to go," he said to the men entering the flight deck. “Where are we going?”

“I’m waiting for Orac to report,” Blake said.

“On what?”

“There are twenty-eight clone children out there somewhere, as well as Alishia and Kai. The parents of twelve adopted children responded to our broadcast appeal. We’ve visited four of them so far, and we think three of those four are clones but we’ve no hard evidence.

“Now we have Orac back the search should be much easier." Blake patted the humming computer. "I’ve ordered it to search all the IndSys adoption records for possible clone children and then to run facial recognition on each. By the time it’s done we should have a list of twenty-eight names, locations and who they were cloned from.”

“And then what? What on earth do you plan to do with twenty-eight twelve year olds?”

“Make an irrefutable case,” Blake said. “Kai isn’t enough- people are just saying that he’s your illegitimate son and I’m in denial about it. With more children we can have evidence that everyone will have no choice but to believe.”

“But why does that matter so much?" Tarrant asked.

Blake frowned at him. “You know why it matters. It’s your plan.”

“I still don’t know what this plan is.”

“But you came up with it!” Blake was looking baffled. 

A horrible thought was dawning on Tarrant. He turned to Avon, silent at his console.

“What did you tell him?”

“What I needed to,” Avon said. "I couldn’t have you both being martyrs.”

“You told him that I wanted him to go with you?"

“You mean you didn’t?” Blake was thunderstruck.

“I didn’t know anything until I was interrogated about it.” Tarrant said. “Then all I knew was that you’d buggered off for no apparent reason, leaving me in prison, just like Avon did. That’s all I still know.”

“No wonder you’re so angry,” Blake was looking horrified. "He lied to me. Why the hell did I trust him for a moment?”

“I was wondering that, too.” Tarrant said. 

They were both looking at Avon now. He shrugged.

“It was necessary. You wouldn’t leave without him, I guessed that he wouldn’t leave without you. I could only take one of you that evening, and I knew I was going to need help.” 

“So if this isn’t Tarrant’s plan that we’re following, who’s is it?”

“Some rubbish I came up with on the spur of the moment,” Avon said lightly. “It was never going to work. That should have been obvious.”

“I did wonder,” Blake said. “But it was really important to you, or so he said, so I thought we ought to at least give it a try.”

"What I really want to know," Tarrant said to Avon, "is what you planned to do when we inevitably found out? Now, in fact." 

"It didn't really matter. You weren't going to find out while you were still in prison, and once we'd got you out the deception had served its purpose. You'd be annoyed with me, but then, when aren't you for some reason or another? I don't take it to heart."

He sighed. "Admittedly I wasn't intending for it to go on nearly so long, but as I said, we couldn't find you and Blake would insist on trying to put my half-baked idea into action along the way."

Blake deliberately turned his back on the man. "At least you know what happened now," he said to Tarrant. "Things can be put right between us,"

"I don't think so," Tarrant said. The gulf between him and his husbands felt as wide at ever. "I stopped being in love with you, Roj. I can't just start again. I understand that it wasn't your fault. But when I thought you'll left me I got used to knowing that I was on my own, with no one else looking out for me. It's how I am now. I don't think I could change if I wanted to, and I don't want to. I'm not angry with you. I'm just self sufficient."

“Ok,” Blake said slowly and unhappily. "I understand that's how you feel right now. If you decide that you don't want to be alone, I'll be here. What are you going to do about him?"

Tarrant looked across at Avon's expressionless face then back to Blake. "Nothing at all. If you don't have anywhere to go right now I assume you don't need a pilot. I need to sort out proper rooms of my own and move my stuff into them. When you need me to fly somewhere, call."

There was no shortage of rooms to choose from. Tarrant decided in the end on a suite of three; a games room big enough for a proper VR set up, a spacious sitting room and a snug bedroom which would take a single bed and his wardrobes. It was five minutes walk or a couple of minutes run from the flight deck and on a different corridor to either of his husbands. 

He collected up everything he wanted from Blake's rooms and instructed the robots on where to take it, then headed towards the suite he'd shared with Avon. To his relief it was unoccupied. It didn't take long to gather up his clothes and a couple of bits of electronics. Everything else he'd get the ship to provide. 

Tarrant left the pile of clothes in the corridor; he'd send the robots for it when they'd finished with his other stuff. Carrying just the electronics, he walked back to his rooms, thinking about how he'd furnish the sitting room. 

There was a single chair already in there, and Avon lounging in it, tapping at a hand console.

"This is my place now," Tarrant said. "You could wait outside."

"I'm beginning to think you may have been married to me for too long," Avon said. "I hadn't realised that you'd become callous enough to break Blake's heart and feel nothing but blithe indifference. "

"Don't pretend you give a damn about him." 

"Blake's not my business," Avon said."You are, at least until you make good on that threat to divorce me. Ten months in a prison camp shouldn't be enough to turn you into a recluse incapable of a flicker of empathy for the man you loved."

"You don't get to judge me," Tarrant said. He couldn't even manage anger. He just wished Avon would go. "Not after all your lies." 

Avon shrugged. "White lies, this time. All they did was keep Blake out of a prison he didn't deserve, which gave me the assistance I needed to get you out of yours. It did you no harm, unless you think that they'd have let you have your marital visits on Saturn?"

Saturn had been a long way away from anywhere with legal visitation rights. It hadn't stopped Tarrant from knowing that he'd been abandoned, though. He hadn't even had a chance to say goodbye, thanks to Avon.

"You don't know what it was like there."

"And what difference would it have made it if I had? All I needed to know was how to get you out. Which, incidentally, was both dangerous and difficult and neither of us has had a word of acknowledgement from you about it."

That hit home, despite Tarrant's best attempt to convince himself that it shouldn't. "Thank you, then." he said reluctantly.

"Sod that," Avon got to his feet. "I don't want gratitude. I want you to admit that there's something very wrong, and it isn't you falling out of love with either of us, whatever you think that means. We got you out of a highly dangerous situation and went on to get you the medical treatment that saved your life. That'd not the sort of thing that you'd normally just overlook, however pissed off you were.

"As for Blake, you might be tired of him but that wouldn't turn you mean-spirited. If you were to dump him I would have sworn that you'd at least try to do it considerately. Back there you were anything but kind. So tell me what's going on."

"There's nothing going on. I'm sorry if I've disappointed you, but there's nothing else I can say."

"A poorly cooked meal disappoints me. A ship alert in the middle of sex disappoints me. Being expected to drink some of your tepid alternatives to decent wine disappoints me. The disintegration of my marriage is not disappointing, Del. It's intolerable. And unlike Blake I don't intend to sit back and wait for you to come to your senses on your own."

"Now you care about our marriage? What about when I was in jail when you couldn’t be bothered to even visit?"

"You didn't seriously mind about that?" Avon looked startled. "I assumed you'd be no more impressed by the limitations of prison visiting than I was. I was also very busy. I had to figure out how to get at least one of you out before they shipped you off to God knows where, and I had no resources to call on at all."

"It doesn't matter," Tarrant said. "It's over, Kerr. There's nothing you can do about it. You're both better off without me anyway."

For some reason that made Avon smile. "I was waiting for you to come out with something like that. If you won’t tell me what’s wrong, I’ll tell you. You're depressed, Tarrant, that's all. Common or garden stress-related depression. You shut down your emotions to survive the prison and they haven't yet come back online."

"You’re wrong. I felt far too much," Tarrant said, "I'd like you to leave now."

"Think about it," Avon suggested, walking to the door, "Do the research. Run a diagnostic. Try sex; see how that makes you feel."

"You haven't been listening." Tarrant said. "I don't feel anything for either of you."

"So? You slept with me for years for no better reason than lust. You could do that again. If you really don't want to, well, loss of libido is a common depressive symptom. Add it to the diagnostic." Avon stepped through the doorway and was gone.

“So where’s this list then?”  


Tarrant had been called away from the new Fleet Encounter game. They’d tweaked it of course, to make him and Liberator beatable- the game was hardly commercial if one side always won. He’d been playing it through from the Fed side, watching his simulated self make mistakes he’d avoided.  


Maybe he’d complain to the games team. He didn’t much like being presented as this fallible. Maybe he wouldn’t. Anyway, he’d wanted to see how it turned out and instead he was on the flight deck with Avon and Blake, looking at an empty screen.  


“I thought I’d wait until we were all here,” Blake said.  


“Why? It’s only going to be a list of children’s names. We aren’t going to recognise any of them.”  


The twelve year olds in Tarrant’s social circle numbered two and they already knew exactly 50% of them were cloned.  


Blake gave him a slightly bewildered look. “It’s not the children’s names. It’s the names of the people they were cloned from.”  


Avon was trying to look as if he didn’t care. Tarrant finally realised what the issue was.  


“You think one of you might be on the list? It’s not likely. Only 15% of the clones survived, as far as we know.”  


“You’re assuming they were randomised,” Avon said. “It’s just as likely that they grouped them, yours with ours.”  


“Poor kids,” Tarrant said without much though. “Are we going to stand here speculating or look at this list?”  


There were certainly Names, all right, people who had been or still were system leaders, IndSys politicians, military, campaigners of various sorts. Enough of them were still influential that this had the prospect for chaos if not handled well.  


The last name scrolled up the screen and Blake let out a held breath. Avon had relaxed as well, Tarrant thought, though it was always harder to tell. Neither of their names had appeared.  


“Well, that’s everyone,” Blake said. “At least now we know.”  


“What about Alishia? Did you find out who she’s cloned from?”  


“We haven’t looked,” Blake said. “Dayna wouldn’t want us to.”  


“Rather more importantly, she’s a girl,” Tarrant said. “Since she couldn’t be cloned from either of you, you weren’t interested.”  


“Our clones died in space,” Blake said sharply. “If you could manage a few seconds of respect that would be appreciated.”  


“I thought you were relieved that your names weren’t on the list?”  


“I can feel more than one thing at once,”  


“Don’t expect Tarrant to understand that at the moment. He’s forgotten how to feel anything at all.” Avon said. “Go back to your game, Del, the show’s all over here. I don’t imagine you have an opinion on what we should do next, or indeed anything else.”

Liberator’s flight deck had been reconstructed from a scant handful of public domain photos. Everything was in the wrong place and they’d added spiky decorative bits to make it look more ‘alien’.  


There were far more images of himself available and consequently the young Del Tarrant surrendering to Tarrant’s current avatar as Admiral of the Earth Fleet might have been genuine vid, except that it hadn’t happened. The game faded out to the disconcerting image of two of him, one standing to attention at the front of the flight deck and the other kneeling in handcuffs, as Liberator, redecorated in Federation colours, led the fleet back to Earth to overthrow Blake’s Revolution.  


He’d won, apparently. Tarrant checked the online score; he was in the top 3% of first time players, which meant that there were nearly quarter of a million people who could apparently defeat his own strategies better than he could. He also noticed that 74% of players had chosen to play the Feds rather than the Rebels.  


He sat for a while in the quiet after the VR transmission came to an end. Finally he moved through to the sitting room and sank into an armchair.  


“Zen. Find me a reliable human psychiatric diagnostic programme and run it.”


	8. Clone

“Are you sure that you want to do this?”  


“Please stop fussing,” Tarrant said wearily. He didn’t want to do this. All he wanted to do was go back to his room, close the door against the rest of the world, sleep and play games. But he was determined that he wasn’t going to let this damn depression defeat him completely and that meant doing things that he didn’t want to do.  


Top of that list was meeting Kai. It had to be done and Blake’s bothering him really wasn’t helping at all.

“It’s good to see you again,” Blake said with apparent sincerity to the couple standing in the neat living room. “May I introduce my husband, Del? Del, I’d like you to meet Merim and Neris, Kai’s parents.”  


Tarrant wasn’t convinced that either of them were particularly keen on meeting him. There were nods of the head but no offer to shake hands.  


“We don’t mean to be rude,” Neris said to Blake. “But we don’t want you to see Kai again. This business has been very disruptive; his behaviour has become erratic and he’s been in trouble at school. People have been saying all sorts of things to him and it’s upset him greatly. You have to leave him alone.”  


“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “I recognise how hard this has been for all of you. But shutting us out won’t stop it happening. These children- Kai and the others- won’t have the choice to be anonymous as they grow up. They are going to need their rights established and justice for what was done to them.”  


“He’s just a child!” Merim protested. “You’ve no right to drag him into your politicking. And now you bring someone into our house who’s just escaped from prison! He killed people! It’s all over the news. What sort of role model is he for our boy?”  


Blake was starting to glower. “Del was in prison because he took your side against the Republic! What do you think Frais would be like to raise a child in today if we’d let the Republic keep it and all the other systems by force? Tarrant’s been fighting oppression all his life. There isn’t a single man alive who would be a better role model for Kai, not one!”  


“We don’t want Kai to fight anyone!” Merim hissed. “We want him to get a good education, go for a respectable career, have a proper, normal relationship and a family of his own.” She was glaring at Tarrant now. “What can you teach him about any of those things?”  


He reached a hand to Blake’s sleeve to stop the man from replying. They were right, of course. He was the product of a bygone age when you could fight your demons with space weaponry instead of receiving psychiatric treatment for them. He hadn’t anything to offer the boy.  


“We’ve got half the day off school,” a clear young voice from behind him proclaimed. “And… Oh, hello, Blake!”  


There was a silence as he and Tarrant looked at each other. Tarrant must seem unbelievably old to to a twelve year old. Did Kai see his future in him, as he couldn’t help but see his past in the boy, or was he just an aging man carrying an unlikely name?  


“You came!” the boy said. His grin was bizarrely familiar. “I knew you’d escape their prison. I told you!” he said to his parents. “I said he’d come!”  


“Would you go to your room, please, Kai?” His mother was cool. “We have grown up things to talk about.”  


Kai hesitated, torn between obedience and excitement. “You won’t go without talking to me?” He begged Tarrant. “I’ve got so much to show you!”  


“That’s not my decision,” Tarrant said. “I’m your parents’ guest.” It felt like an entirely inadequate response but the only one he could make.  


“You won’t make him go, will you?” Kai appealed to his parents. “Say you won’t!”  


“Go to your room now, Kai,” Merim said again.  


Kai did what he was told, feet dragging.  


“Please leave our house now,” Merim said to Tarrant and Blake as soon as the door closed behind him. “And you will not be welcome back.”

“So you’ll need another figurehead,” Avon said. “Any ideas?”  


“We have to visit all the clones anyway.” Blake had called up the list already. “There must be some parents who understand the importance of what we’re trying to do. Don’t you agree, Del?”  


Tarrant shrugged. The encounter with the child had been deeply unsettling. Kai clearly wanted something important from him and he had no idea how to provide it, even if the parents hadn’t banned all contact. He felt guilty about the extent of his relief at that ban.  


Blake was looking at him with the kind of helpless worry that Tarrant hated. Avon had turned to consider the list on the screen. The man had stopped talking directly to him. Tarrant wasn’t sure whether it was intended as punishment for leaving him or whether Avon had simply decided that his defective mental state rendered him uninteresting. Either way he didn't particularly object. If he could have figured out a way to get Blake to stop talking to him too he'd probably have taken it.

Avon had said nothing when Tarrant had reluctantly presented the conclusions of his diagnostic, not even "I told you so". But when Tarrant had got back to his rooms later that day he'd found a small plastic container full of ship- synthesised medication on the coffee table and instructions for taking them on his screen.  


He hadn't then yet decided whether he wanted to take drugs. He hadn’t been entirely sure that he wanted to get better, if 'better' meant back the way things had been, forever running between one of them and the other, trying to be for each of them what he thought they wanted. He liked the stillness of his room. He liked the idea of sleeping alone, of playing games as late as he wanted with no one waiting patiently (or not) for him to come to bed.  


But he didn't much like the flatness, the way nothing mattered, the disappearance of his old energy. He hated waking abruptly, heart racing, for the moment certain that he was back in the camp and another day of purgatory lay ahead. He could feel better than this without having to go back to either of them.  


He had thought about it for half a day and then he took the first tablet.

Tarrant was waiting for the food dispenser when Avon came into the galley. The man paused, then came to stand beside him.  


How’s the medication going?” he asked.  


Tarrant honestly didn’t know. In the last week he’d started to feel a little less empty but the emotions that had replaced that weren’t particularly desirable.  


“I’m taking it,” he said flatly.  


“What about your libido?”  


“Is that all you’re interested in?” Tarrant demanded.  


“It’s something I can’t tell just from talking to you, hence the question.”  


Tarrant wasn’t sure about that either. Something was happening, he supposed; he’d woken with a erection a couple of times which with some effort had given rise to rather flat orgasms but that was still more than the last six months had generated. Physiologically it was progress. Emotionally… “Don’t pin your hopes on a bit of neurochemistry, Avon. This marriage is over.”  


He took his bowl and sat down. Avon was watching him, eyes dark.  


“Just keep taking the meds,” he said, and walked out.


	9. Missing

Tarrant woke up feeling good.  
  
He stretched out under the warm bedclothes, eyes still closed. There was no particular reason why he should feel optimistic. They were due to visit the last few children's families, most of whom wouldn't want to listen to anything they had to say if the last three weeks had been anything to go by.   
  
Still, he did feel positive. Maybe it was the thought of finally finishing with the clone visits. He'd skipped as many of them as he could, particularly if the children were likely to be present. Even the thought of those awkward encounters seemed manageable this morning.  
  
He was running late, as usual. It didn't matter. If the other two needed him they'd call, and if not, how long it took him to get to the flight deck wasn't important.  
  
Breakfast was coffee and rolls in the galley while he caught up with the latest racing news on vid from Frais. They were talking about merging the Independent league with the Republican one, which might make the upcoming season his last chance to go for the Senior trophy. He was unlikely to be allowed to race in the Solar System whilst on the run from their prison system.   
  
He ought to go for it. It was too long since he'd done any real competitive flying. He deserved something fun after the year he'd had. The others could fit Liberator's schedule round the race timetable, or just leave him on Frais for the season. It was only three months; they'd managed without him for more than twice that long white he was stuck on Saturn.  
  
Yes. He'd do it. There was time between now and the season start to commission a new flyer. Avon's little racer was still on board; she was too old and slow for competition these days but still nippy enough to let him get back into practice until he got a new one.   
  
He finished his coffee and strolled down to the flight deck to tell the others. They ought to be pleased that he'd found something he wanted to do and if they weren't, to hell with them, he'd do it anyway.  
  
  
  
Blake was not quite shouting at the screen. "I've told you already that we had absolutely nothing to do with it!"  
  
"Then you won't object to helping us with our enquiries." The woman was wearing the uniform of the Frais police.   
  
"We will answer any questions you have over this link," Blake was clearly trying to be reasonable despite his anger. "But we're not going to kick our heels in your police station. Someone has to do something constructive."  
  
Avon was standing out of the view of the screen, doing nothing but listening.   
  
"Zen," Tarrant said quietly. "Origin of the transmission on screen."  
  
"Transmission originates on Frais."  
  
So not a local call. Tarrant came forward to stand by Blake. "What's going on?"  
  
"Kai's gone missing," Blake said.   
  
"What's that got to do with us?"  
  
"According to the parents you are the only ones with both the motive and the ability to take the child from his room," the officer said. "Del Tarrant, Roj Blake, I have to inform you that if you refuse to attend the station on Frais as requested, I have a warrant for your arrests on the charge of kidnapping a minor."  
  
Tarrant stared at her. "Bloody hell. This is ridiculous. We're not criminals. Don't our reputations count for anything at all?" He could see his chances of racing on Frais receding into the distance if this wasn't sorted out.  
  
"Your reputations are hardly to your credit," she said." I understand that the governnent has received a request for your extradition to the Republic to complete your sentences."  
  
"Extradition!" He was outraged. "We were convicted of fighting the Republic for your systems' fucking rights, Officer. And now you want to extradite us? We had nothing to do with the child's disappearance and we don't give a damn about your warrant."  
  
Blake's hand gripped his shoulder as he spoke over Tarrant's spluttering. "Give us what information you have about this and I give you my word that we'll do our best to find him, We have resources that you don't and Kai's safety is the most important thing here."  
  
"Give up the boy," the woman retorted. "With both IndSys and the Republic hunting you, you and your ship have nowhere to go. You're still the heroes of the Revolution to most people, for all the mistakes you've made since. This would be a sorry end for both of you and Liberator. Give up now and let him go back to his parents."  
  
She really believed that they were guilty. Beside him Blake huffed frustration. "We'll look for him, whether you help us or not. I suggest you do the same. Zen, close transmission."  
  
Blake turned to Avon. "Who do you think could have kidnapped him?"  
  
"No one," Tarrant said with the confidence of a shared genome. "He's run away. He’ll be looking for me. We'll have to find him."

Runaway children could go missing for good far too easily. They’d never get their names cleared that way. Besides, Kai... His thoughts stuttered to a halt. He’d said no more than a few words to the boy. How could he feel so responsible?

"We’ll go to Frais," Blake said."Pick up the trail."

"If we get spotted there without Liberator our camouflage is dead," Avon said

"We barely use it these days anyway," Blake said. "If it’s discovered it won’t make much difference to us. You’d better see if Orac’s got anything for us, Avon."

Tarrant half expected Avon to complain that this was none of their business, but he moved to the computer and started to talk to it in a low voice.

Tarrant started to pull up a list of their usual aliases. Something fast, so they could get out of trouble without giving themselves away. It didn’t have to be large; no-one need know how many people were on board, but it should have prior Frais clearances so they weren’t stuck negotiating with air traffic control.

He hadn’t done this for a while; before Saturn, he supposed. There was the wave of familiar resentment at everyone; Dayna, the Superintendent, his husbands, the Republic, the man whose name he still didn’t know and life in general. He'd had enough of feeling resentful, he decided. It didn’t fit with the sort of man he thought himself. He pushed the emotions aside and went back to the task in hand.  
  
  


  
  
There was a knack to flying Liberator as if she were a ship a twentieth of her actual size. They were close enough to Frais now that Tarrant needed to take their disguise seriously. Still, he had enough attention to spare for a question of the other man currently in the flight deck.  
  
"Who sent you the video?"  
  
"Huh?" Avon blinked for a moment. "Oh, the Saturn one. When you didn't ask before I assumed you must already know."  
  
Tarrant just waited.  
  
"His name's Ripa Gentian and he's a senior officer in Republican Military Intelligence. He got in touch with us shortly after Blake started the broadcasts with Kai. When neither bribes nor direct threats dissuaded Blake, he went after you."  
  
"Did he tell you that's what he was going to do?"  
  
"Yes," Avon said. "Would you have expected that to make Blake fold?"  
  
Tarrant thought about it briefly. "No. But you might have tried to stop him."  
  
"We did try. We set out to track Gentian's movements, hoping he'd lead us to you. He didn't hang around, unfortunately,and we didn't have either Orac or a fast enough ship. By the time we found out where he'd gone you were already in the hospital and the video arrived shortly afterwards. We're pretty sure he hadn't intended to nearly kill you, if that makes a difference."  
  
"Nobody reckoned on my frailty." Tarrant said, a little bitterly.  
  
"I wouldn't call you frail." Avon said. "I did a bit of investigation. Based on Zen's records, Orac reckons your heart problem had a 65% chance of being caused by damage not fully healed during your previous extended spell in the med unit."  
  
"You mean that you caused it by shooting me."  
  
"Yes." Avon said flatly,  
  
"What have you got to gain by telling me that?"  
  
Avon shrugged. "If you're going to hold grudges, you might as well hold real ones."

Tarrant decided that he'd think about that later. "Where is he now?"

"Gone to ground," Avon said. "Once we start making a noise about the clones again he’ll turn up, and then I’ll kill him.” It was the matter of fact tone that always meant that Avon was unshakeably serious. 

"What if I want to do it myself?"  
  
"If you get a clear shot, go for it." Avon said. "But I'm guessing you won't murder him in cold blood." He paused. "Blake would, but I intend to get there first."  
  
"Blake wouldn't."  
  
"He would." Avon said. "I've been at the wrong end of that, remember? He's as capable of ripping someone who did that to you into bloodied shreds as I am. He's just more likely to feel guilty afterwards."

Avon was possessive, that was all. He'd react the same way if someone had damaged Orac. This would be a particularly bad time for Tarrant to start attributing the sort of emotions to the man that he'd failed to detect so much of a trace of in over thirty years. He didn't even want to be in this marriage any more so why was his unreliable heart racing? Avon didn't reciprocate, never had, never would. It had to be time to move on. 

"Just let me know when you hear anything. I want a chance at that shot."

"I've just got automatic comms from Frais." Avon said. "Sending our data now. Zen, tell Blake well be in orbit in twenty minutes."

Tarrant turned on his heel, slowly, to take in all of the small room. 3D ships plastered the walls, including at least three pictures of Liberator. On the back of the door there was a flat pic of his much younger self in something not quite like his early Republican uniform. Taken from a vid game, he thought, not a genuine photo. 

"There are some heavily encrypted messages on this comm unit," Blake said. "Not what you'd expect for a 12 year old. I'll send it up to Orac to unscramble. Any thoughts on the place?"

There was a picture of him on the kid's door. He didn't expect that from a 12 year old either. Tarrant decided not to say anything about that. 

Clothes were pulled out of drawers and scattered on the floor. Kai's parents didn't seem the laissez-faire type. "He's been packing. Kidnappers don't stop off to collect a change of underwear. He left of his own accord." 

He started to search through the easily accessible stuff. "No hand held console. Every keen gamer's got one, He's taken it with him.'

"Can we trace it?"

"I couldn't. Orac might."

Blake picked up a small metal model of the ship. "Was your bedroom like this?"

"Moreorless, except that I had Fed military recruitment posters as well. I was obsessed with joining up at the time." He tried to read Blake's expression without success.

"I don't think Kai's parents would allow that." was all that Blake said. 

"Front door's opening." Avon said through the comm.

Blake put the model down exactly where it had been. "Teleporting back up."

"You're lucky. They won't let me even look for mine."

The girl on the screen was bright eyed and determined. "I bet your Del Tarrant knows,though. He could help us. You could live with him on Liberator and I could find my real mother, if only our parents weren't so unfair."

"Who is she?" Blake asked Orac.

"The image is a simulation," the computer said."The speaker is a disguised human adult."

Tarrant's heart sank. Someone had the boy. He'd been counting on finding the kid hanging around a dock somewhere trying to cadge a lift offworld. 

"Gentian." It was only half a question from Blake. 

"Find him," Tarrant demanded of Avon. "I don't care how." Gentian had beaten him almost to death to make a point. What might he do to a child?

"It could take a while." Avon said. "Get some sleep."

"We'll find him." Blake walked beside him, reaching out to touch his hand briefly. "Gentian wants to discredit the clones. He'll need Kai alive for that."

"I think I liked it better when I didn't care about anything."

"It was probably easier, but you're coming back to who you really are, Del. You can't fight it forever because it hurts."

"Can't I?" For a moment he pictured himself leaving Liberator and all her problems behind and spending a few months racing on Frais. Except that he couldn't, not while that warrant was out. 

"If you ever want to talk," Blake said." Not necessarily about us, or Kai, or what happened to you. About anything at all. Or if you just want to come home for an hour or two, no strings attached, the door is always open for you. Always."

They had reached the corridor junction, For a moment the option of just walking home with Blake seemed so simple. Then the weight of reality descended again. "Goodnight," he said, and turned away. 


	10. Deal

Pursuit ship.  
  
He didn't need to open his eyes to know that much. The hum of the engines, the feel of the air system; he was in a pursuit ship, one of the more recent models and traveling fast.  
  
That was bad. He and Blake had been on a station in the Alpha Centauri system. They had found someone willing to talk to them about Gentian. And now he was sprawled on the floor of a Republican military ship, with no memory of how he'd got here.  
  
Blake. Tarrant pushed himself up into his knees. "Hello," he said to the armed guard. "You don't happen to know where my husband is, do you?"  
  
"As it happens, I do."  
  
Tarrant was better with voices than faces and he'd heard that one before. The guard was old enough to have served under him. "I should know you, shouldn't I?"  
  
"I found your other husband for you. You do seem to be good at losing them."  
  
Tarrant placed the face to the voice and frowned. "Herios, isn't it?" They'd been a lieutenant over twenty years ago, and they'd been smart and observant. "Shouldn't you be a senior officer by now?"  
  
"Nice of you to say so, Commander. And yes, I am."   
  
"Military Intelligence?"  
  
They nodded.  
  
"You could have picked a better career. The Republic needs decent soldiers. It doesn't need political assassins or kidnappers of children."  
  
"You used MI when it suited you."  
  
"And regretted it," Tarrant said.   
  
"I imagine a life like yours leaves quite a lot to regret."  
  
"Less than you might think," Tarrant said, sitting back on his heels. He didn't want to look as if he was a threat, at least not until he was ready to be one. "You're too young to remember much of the Federation. We freed half the galaxy from a regime a great deal more competent at doing harm than yours."   
  
"I've studied pre Revolutionary History and I tend to agree with you. What you and Blake achieved was remarkable. But you were much lousier administrators than you were revolutionaries. You let the whole secession issue blindside you and we're still paying the price."  
  
Tarrant wasn't entirely sure why they were discussing politics, but he was going to defend his and Blake's position. "There hasn't been a war. There's trade, diplomacy, cultural exchanges, people passing freely between the Republic and IndSys all the time. There have been difficult moments, I grant you, but it's worked out."  
  
"When were you last on Earth?" Herios asked. "Outside a remand cell and a courtroom, that is? You don't know how anyone on Earth feels. They look out and they see IndSys systems thriving, jobs to do, space to live in, fortunes to make. Earth is crowded and its people are unemployed."  
  
"They could go to the stars themselves," Tarrant said. "There's half a billion empty worlds out there and nothing to stop the Republic settling them." It had been a key point of the peace agreement.   
  
"You're missing the point," Herios said."They don't want to become settlers on an alien world. They want their lives on Earth to be better, just as Roj Blake promised. Promises he kept for IndSys but not for them."  
  
"What's this got to do with Kai?" Tarrant demanded. "And where is Blake?"  
  
"Blake is on Liberator. Your husbands are currently chasing down the wrong set of ships. They'll figure out their mistake soon enough and you'll no doubt be teleported back when they get close enough."  
  
"And before that?" Because he doubted that he been brought here just to talk over old history.   
  
"Before that, you're going to make a public statement about your son. Then you can take him home."  
  
  
  
They'd written his statement for him. Tarrant read it through with increasing trepidation. There was no way they could expect him to say any of this of his own free will and they couldn't break him physically in just a couple of hours which meant that they thought they had other leverage. If Blake was free that could only mean Kai.   
  
They wanted him to say that the boy was his son, the result of a casual infidelity, that Blake had taken advantage of the startling family resemblance to reinstate the old rumours about cloning, his revenge against a Republic that had rejected him.  
  
Here, on cue, was Kai at the door, white faced, running to the one familiar face in the room. He couldn't but hold the child comfortingly tight. They'd done this - not with the lies that Herios wanted him to admit to, but they'd put Kai at risk for the sake of the truth and Tarrant couldn't do anything now but win his safety.  
  
Kai was frightened already. There was no point in going through the motions of defiance and have them traumatise the kid with explicit threats. Tarrant looked over the curly head to Herios, watching them silently.  
  
"Set up the recording," he said. "I'll read your script."  
  
  
  
It was done. The lies had been bitter in his mouth but they were said. He'd deny the whole thing once they were free but most people wouldn't listen.   
  
"I've made this easy for you," he said to Herios. "You could do one thing for me. A favour, like the one I did you once."  
  
"What favour?" They didn't just say no. He doubted that they'd wanted to exert their leverage. Hurting children wasn't most people's idea of job satisfaction.  
  
"IndSys think we kidnapped Kai. If I know police forces, they'll be very reluctant to let go of the idea. If the clones' foster parents think you're behind Kai's kidnapping it will frighten them into silence far more effectively then if we're accused of it. If you leave a trail that doesn't point to Liberator it will benefit both of us."   
  
They considered him and Kai now asleep beside him. "You want to be able to go home."  
  
"Liberator's home. But I'm tired of being on the run. It's how we started, Blake and I, but we were younger then. We've had enough running for a dozen lifetimes."  
  
He paused, wondered whether to say the next bit and decided he had to. "I'll try to persuade Blake not to pursue the clone campaign. He wanted justice for them but I've met them and they're fine. They are healthy, they've got homes and families. We'll keep an eye on them all, of course,and if you don't leave them alone we'll have to act. But I don't see the point of going up against the Republic again just to prove their genotypes."  
  
"What about proving the truth?" It seemed a genuine question.  
  
Tarrant shrugged. "The truth had a habit of coming out on its own. It doesn't need my help, not this time. The clone info is out there if anyone chooses to look. The kids won't benefit from us making it front line news."  
  
"Nor will the Republic," Herios said. "I'm inclined to grant your favour, ex-commander Tarrant. I can't do anything about your status in the Republic though. You've still got several years more to serve of your sentence there. The child's rucksack will turn up in the next couple of days somewhere moderately incriminating; the Republic will of course deny everything, and there it will rest."  
  
Tarrant nodded. "What about the extradition?"  
  
Herios thought about that for a moment. "Having you both back in our custody would undoubtedly solve several of our problems but I doubt that anyone in IndSys is capable of taking you off Liberator, let alone keeping you long enough to hand over. I'll see that the request is suspended, for now. Not permanently."  
  
A guard came through for a word in Herios's ear.  
  
"Liberator is gaining on us. All Republic ships have standing orders to take her down, and we have a fleet of seven armed escorts, so you might want to leave as soon as she's in range. About half a minute."   
  
Tarrant woke Kai and put an arm round him. "One more thing," he said to Herios. "Where's Gentian?"  
  
Herios smiled. "We have a peace agreement now, do we not?"  
  
"Not with him," Tarrant said. "You can tell him that." If he wasn't already listening.  
  
  
  
Kai had perked up instantly when he realised that they’d teleported to Liberator. He claimed that he wanted to see every bit of the ship. Since Tarrant had some flying to do, the job of tour guide was delegated to Blake.  
  
Tarrant shook off the pursuit ships and set a roundabout route back to Frais.   
  
“That was quite a performance,” Avon said from the console below him. Tarrant guessed he wasn’t talking about the piloting.  
  
“I got the child back safely.”  
  
“Do you really think they’d have hurt him?”  
  
“They hurt me. I wasn’t going to take the chance.”  
  
“And now we have a propaganda problem,” Avon said.  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Tarrant said. “You only started this clone business to persuade Blake out of prison. Give me one good reason why we should keep on with it.”  
  
“Drop it now and they'll think Blake a liar and vindictive with it,” Avon said.  
  
“I’ll put out a disclaimer, of course. But those who want to think badly of us will do so. For those who care about what was done to the clones, the evidence is there."  
  
“You might find there are fewer of those than you think.”  
  
  
  
“You made a deal with Military Intelligence?” Blake had put the abruptly exhausted child to bed in his room and was back on the flight deck with them. "What the hell were you thinking?”  
  
“I was thinking of the children. I’m sorry, Roj. I know you want to help them but we can’t protect them all from the Republic. The parents know what they are now; we ought to back off and let them do what they think best with the information.”  
  
“And what do you think of this deal?” Blake turned on Avon.  
  
“The clones were always a sideshow. What mattered was getting Tarrant and the ship back. If we can disentangle ourselves from this campaign with only a moderate amount of harm done to our reputation we should do it.”  
  
“What about Gentian?” Blake demanded of both of them. “What about the ‘moderate’ amount of harm done to Tarrant?”  
  
“Gentian’s safety is no part of any deal,” Tarrant said. “We’ll get him, I promise.”  
  
"These are the very people who created the babies and sent two hundred off to their deaths! I won't go along with this!"  
  
"My ship," Avon said calmly. "My pilot. What you do away from her is your affair but on Liberator I have the veto. I'm with Tarrant."  
  
"You're trying to ingratiate yourself with him. No difficulty guessing why."  
  
"Hey!" Tarrant said. "This isn't personal, Roj. Don't try to make it so."  
  
"Nothing's personal with you any more. Your conscience had gone the way of your feelings. You just want an easy life and you think this is it."  
  
"Whereas you're just trying to pick a fight!" Tarrant retorted. "The clone scheme failed, the kids are fine. We won. Let it go!"  
  
"Are you two leaving me any choice?" Blake shook his head. “We’ll take Kai back home and then we’ll discuss this again."  
  


The door slid open and he could see the blankets move as Blake stirred on the couch. Tarrant walked quietly over to the bedroom door and watched the sleeping child for a little longer than was strictly necessary.  
  
Behind him Blake’s soft voice said “He’ll be all right. He’s got resilient genes.”  
  
“Not as resilient as I used to think.” Tarrant closed the door gently and walked back to sit on the couch. “I hope there’s a lot that he doesn’t inherit.”  
  
“He’ll do all right. Coffee?”  
  
“Yes please.” He watched Blake bustle around in his dressing gown. It was painfully familiar. “I came to apologise. I still think I’m right but I should have listened to what you had to say.”  
  
“You had Avon on your side,” Blake said without looking up from the dispenser. “You didn’t need to persuade me as well.”  
  
“That’s not how it works, or at least that’s not how it should work. Playing you off against each other is not the action of the sort of person I want to be.”  
  
“A couple of weeks ago you wouldn’t have cared,” Blake said. “Forget what I said earlier. You’re definitely getting back to your usual self.”  
  
He brought the drinks over and sat in the chair opposite Tarrant. “How can we abandon the children now, when we know what the Republic is prepared to do?"  
  
“The Republic only cares about its publicity,” Tarrant said. “The louder we shout, the more they think they need to act. And we won’t abandon the children. I told Herios that we’d be watching, and they know we’re a force to be reckoned with, the three of us and the ship. They didn’t even try to stop you getting me back.”  
  
“And you didn’t even try to stand up to them,” Blake said. “Yes, I know your reasons and I can’t disagree with what you did. But thirty years ago you’d have broken out and taken the ship singlehanded. I wonder if we’re getting too old to do this any more.”   
  
“Not that old,” Tarrant said. “Maybe old enough to need to pick our battles rather than fight every one that comes along. Twelve years ago we saved Kai and the others. They don't need saving again. Let them go, Blake. “  
  
Blake glanced towards the closed door. “Is that what you’re going to do? Let him go?”  
  
“I doubt if I have a choice,” Tarrant said. “His parents aren't going to change their minds about me after this little escapade."  
  
“When they turn thirteen, adopted children have a legal right to try to contact their blood relatives,” Blake said. “You’re going to have to make a decision soon enough, and so will everyone else cloned into a living child.”  
  
“I can’t turn him away, obviously. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him though.”  
  
“Be an uncle,” Blake suggested. “You’re not a parent in any meaningful sense and however exciting he finds the ship, this is not his home. Biologically you’re a twin of a different generation- that’s as close to uncle as I can imagine.”  
  
“A lot of people will believe I’m his natural father. After all, I said so on camera.”  
  
“And you’ve also said you aren’t. What matters is what Kai thinks. Do you want him believing that?”  
  
“Hell, no!” Tarrant said. “I don’t want him to think I conceived and abandoned him, or that he’s got an unknown mother out there.”  
  
“Uncle, then,” Blake said.  
  
“I don’t know anything about children, but I suppose we’ll muddle through,” Tarrant drank his coffee.  
  
“We?” Blake asked.  
  
Tarrant spluttered slightly. “You’re not going to make me do this on my own?”  
  
“You could ask Avon.”  
  
“Who would truly be the uncle from hell. Come on, Roj. This is definitely your field of expertise if it's anyone’s.”  
  
"You're my husband," Blake said. "If Kai's your nephew he's mine as well."

Tarrant put down the empty mug. "I haven't been much of a husband recently, have I?"

Blake sat back a little. "Do you think you're ready to talk about it yet?"

"Not tonight," Tarrant said. "We'll take the kid home, get the police off our backs, take a break from all this. Then, maybe. Maybe." He stood up to leave. "Thanks for the open door."

"Always," Blake said. "I'll be waiting, as long as it takes."


	11. Curiosity

"How's it going?"

"She handles beautifully," Tarrant beamed at Blake, dropping the brochure he'd been reading back onto the table. "They're doing the final bit of fine tuning for me now. I could do it myself but their engineers will be faster. An hour, they said, and then I can take her out again."

"I'm glad to hear it. When's the first race again?

"Qualifiers are in three days’ time, first round in six. I got you a couple of VIP tickets for those. I thought you might ask if Vila's free. There'll be hospitality attached, even if he's not interested in the racing."

"Not Avon?"

That bewildered Tarrant. "Why would he want to come?"

"He might like it if you asked him, at least."

It was the quickest way that Tarrant could imagine to an earful of sarcasm, but he could endure that, he supposed. "I could do, then."

"Why?"

Tarrant shrugged. "Don't feel obliged. It was just a suggestion."

"Sit on a bench and watch a screen? Hardly my idea of entertainment." 

"You get to see the finish live," Tarrant pointed out.

"When most of the crashes happen. What's the current mortality rate among racer pilots?"

"Insignificant," Tarrant insisted. "At least among professionals, and you know I'd have turned professional if I hadn't been otherwise occupied defending the galaxy. But you really don't have to come. I'd hate to bore you."

"You've been boring me since you got back from Saturn. I was hoping for some excitement a little more personal than watching you fly round in circles. Blake's going, I suppose."

"Yes."

"If you win, is the rush of adrenalin going to be enough to make you to jump into bed with him?"

"There aren't any beds at the stadium, as far as I know."

"Up against a wall, then?"

"It's a first round race, Avon. If I win I'll be moderately pleased. If I don't win I'll be sore as hell. I doubt if I'll find the prospect of quickie sex irresistible either way."

"Then I fail to see how I'll benefit from attending."

"Fine," Tarrant said. "I'll see if Vila wants to come instead."

"As long as you don't screw him," Avon muttered.

"Why would I? I've got two more partners than I need already."

"You don't know what you need," Avon said. "You'd better go and practice flying in circles. I could do without your sulks when you lose."

Tarrant slid out of the cockpit of the tiny craft and onto the tarmac, pausing to wait for Swena, who had come in second. He'd been glad to avoid the dogfight for third, the last qualifying place for the next round. Around them the stadium was still clapping; he raised a hand and waved at the stands. 

"Nice flying," Swena said.

"Likewise, I thought you were going to catch me on the last bend."

"You were well clear," she said. "Next time. There's your husband."

There he was indeed, leaning over the railing that separated the VIP stand from the flyer zone and applauding furiously. With a sudden impulse of affection Tarrant ran to the barrier to throw his arms around Blake. He could feel the familiar arms crushing him in return. Without any conscious decision he kissed Blake and kept on kissing him.

When he finally pulled away all the other pilots had passed him on their way to the presentation. "See you soon," he promised Blake and ran to catch up.

"That was a sorry performance."

Tarrant hadn't expected Avon to be waiting in the teleport room. He let go of Blake's hand, only for Blake to grab his back again.

"I did win."

"Not the race. That disaster of an interview."

Tarrant wasn't sure if Avon's glower was for the admittedly unfortunate encounter with the sports reporter or their joined hands. A lot of both, he suspected. 

"I didn't think you cared what the press had to say about you," Blake retorted.

"That's your justification, is it?"

"Blake was only trying to cover up for the fact that you lied to him." Tarrant snapped. "Personally I think he should have just told her what really happened." 

"And reveal himself to be a gullible idiot. Much easier to slander me, I imagine."

"It was all your fault! If you'd told Blake what game you were playing, he wouldn't have gone after the clones and Military Intelligence would have left me alone!”

"And you might still be starving in prison on Saturn as a result," Avon snapped back at him. "So you got beaten up. It's happened before. It's happened to all of us. Occupational hazard. Get over it."

"Like I had to get over you shooting me in the chest and throwing me out of an airlock?"

"Exactly like that, yes." 

"And what if I've had enough of having to get over the crap I have to put up with from you?"

"Tough." Avon said. "I will no doubt continue saving your ungrateful skin by whatever means necessary, however much my methods might offend you."

He glanced again at their hands, turned on his heel and left.

"Fuck him," Tarrant said into the silence. "Let's go to bed."

“You should probably not come back here tomorrow night.”

“Huh?” Tarrant was sprawled half asleep across their double bed, still damp from their shower. He was thinking, inasmuch as he was thinking at all, that his clean clothes were two corridors away again and maybe he should move his stuff back in. “Tired of me already?”

“Hardly. But it has been a week.”

He rolled over at that and sat up. “I’m not sleeping with Avon. You know that.”

“Whether you are or aren’t is none of my business. But I promised him when you got married that I wouldn’t monopolise you. One week a fortnight we agreed, and my time’s up.”

“And what am I meant to do tomorrow night? Go back to him? After everything he’s done?”

“That’s not my business,” Blake repeated. “But you certainly can’t settle anything with him while he knows you’re in my bed every night.”

Tarrant sat cross-legged on the bed and looked down at his husband. “All right then. How about if I divorce him? Will that stop you kicking me out?”

Blake looked shocked. “It’s not that bad, surely? Can’t you at least talk to him first?”

“What happened to ‘not my business’? I would have thought you’d want me to be free of him.”

“It’s your marriage. I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you that Avon’s pride has been stretched to breaking point by the current situation. If you announce you’re divorcing him as things are now, I have no doubt that we’ll be off this ship and he’ll never speak to either of us again.”

Tarrant might feel relatively indifferent about losing his second husband but he didn’t feel the same way about losing his ship. “I’m not going to have sex with him just to keep Liberator,” he told Blake, though he suspected that he might reconsider should it actually come to that.

“I didn’t say that you should,” Blake said. “I just don’t want you to do something on impulse that can’t ever be put right again if you come to regret it.” 

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll try talking to him.”

Talking to Avon turned out to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. He found out next morning when he went looking that Avon was no longer on the ship.

There was no reason why the man should stay on Liberator. They were expected to stay in orbit around Frais until the racing season was done. Now they’d been cleared of suspicion in Kai’s kidnapping and the extradition request had been dropped, Frais could be considered an entirely friendly port to all of Liberator’s crew. 

Watches were therefore unnecessary, and Zen could be left as Liberator’s sole caretaker. Tarrant had a suspicion that Orac might be capable of stealing the ship if left unattended, but Avon had apparently taken the computer with him anyway, wherever he’d gone.

There was, perhaps regrettably, no real possibility that he’d just walked out on them. Avon’s attachment to Liberator seemed to exceed any attachment to Tarrant by several orders of magnitude. Tarrant had no doubt that if he wanted rid of them he’d maroon them and take the ship, not the other way round. 

It would probably be most sensible to just wait until he returned, but Blake was apparently serious about banning Tarrant from their bed for the next week and he was correspondingly impatient. He wanted to find out where his husband had gone. 

“Where are we going?”

“We’re following Avon. He took the racer and Orac and left the system a few hours ago.”

Blake looked at the empty scan. “How on earth are you going to find him after that sort of time?”

“Zen,” Tarrant said. “Search for tracer ZB1 in the 180 degree arc ahead of us.”

“When did you install a tracer on his ship?”

“Long, long ago,” Tarrant said. “If you can’t keep a step ahead of Avon it’s wise to ensure that you’re no more than a step behind. There.” He indicated the small flashing spot on the screen. “Now shall we overhaul him or hang back to see where he’s going.” 

“I don’t know why we’re following him at all,” Blake said. “Have you two argued again?”

“He hasn’t spoken to me for days. I got up this morning and found he was gone.”

“You’re worried about him?” Blake asked.

“I’m curious, which is why we’re going to follow the trace rather than catch up with it.”

“Are you sure this is wise? It might be considered none of your business.”

“He’s taken Orac,” Tarrant said.

“Which your marriage documents state that you revoke all claim to.” 

“If I do divorce him, I imagine we’ll keep the lawyers tied up for years. For now I consider that I have a legitimate interest in what happens to that computer.” 

Blake eyed him sceptically, then shrugged. “It’s your call, I suppose. I doubt that it’s me that Avon will hold responsible when he finds us spying on him.”

They tracked the signal for a couple of hours before it blinked out.

“He’s disabled it,” Tarrant stated, unnecessarily. “Zen standard by eight. We’ll get to within a couple of million spacials then track him on the scans.”

“Message from Kerr Avon,” Zen announced.

Blake raised an eyebrow at Tarrant. “Put it on screen.”

“What do you think you’re doing, skulking back there?” Avon asked.

“Taking the ship out for a spin,” Tarrant returned. “Where are you off to, anyway? I could have taken you anywhere you wanted to go in a fraction of the time. You only had to ask.”

Avon considered him for a moment. “Pick me up, then.”

“And where are we going after that?”

The screen went blank.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Blake said. “Give me a shout if you need anything. I’ll be in the rec room.”

“Aren’t you curious about what he’s up to?”

“Not enough to want to sit in on this conversation, thanks. It’s all yours.”


	12. Without Responsibility

"Where is he?"

"Keeping out of our way. Does he need to be here?"

"No." Avon walked up to Tarrant's console and started entering numbers.

"So where are we going?" Tarrant asked.

"There's a course put in. Just follow it."

No doubt he'd know soon enough. He took over his place and started to review what he'd been given.

"This would have taken you what, three days in the flyer?" She would do it, no problem, but it wouldn't have been a comfortable trip. 

"I wasn't doing anything else with the time." 

The end point was... nothing. Empty space, light years from any inhabited system. 

"Rendezvous," he guessed. Avon said nothing.

"Fine. I'll take you there. I presume that if we're flying into trouble I'll get a heads up at some point."

"Of course." Avon's tone didn't give any clue as to whether he thought this was likely. 

"When do you want to get there?" It would only take a few hours flat out but it might not be wise to hang round there waiting for whoever it was for days. 

Avon looked at him thoughtfully. "Does Blake's absence indicate that you and I have other business?"

"I suppose so," Tarrant said.

"Put her on standard by six and tell Zen to keep a sharp look out."

"I'm not sure that we have that much business." That would give them about fifteen hours till he needed to take the helm again. Tarrant had been hoping to get away with a very short exchange of views. 

"You've had no problem finding time for him recently."

Ouch. He started to give instructions to Zen. Behind him Avon was composing a curt message to Blake. "... And if it's genuinely urgent, we'll both be in my rooms."

"We can talk here just as well," Tarrant called back to him.

"No, we can't. There or not at all."

'Not at all' sounded tempting but he had promised Blake that he'd try. "No more conditions," he warned. 

"If you're done here we might as well get started." Avon strode off without looking behind him. Sighing, Tarrant followed. 

The quarters than he'd shared with Avon hadn't changed. He could still see the gaps left by the items he'd taken when he'd moved out. Avon was instinctively tidy; Tarrant could almost feel the effort of will it must have taken the man to leave the shelves disarrayed for months after his hasty sort through. He wondered if noticing this was the point of him being here, but Avon said nothing and didn't so much as glance at them. 

Instead he was opening a low cupboard. A bottle of very good wine appeared on the table, followed by a glass. Avon paused, the second glass in his hand.

"Are you joining me?"

The tone was neutral. Tarrant couldn't be sure that Avon knew that he'd given up on his long abstention, but knowing Avon there was every chance that he did. 

"One glass," he said. "My tolerance isn't what it used to be."

Avon nodded in what looked like brief satisfaction and poured then each a glass, then settled into his usual armchair and waited. The sofa offered a familiar comfort; this room had been home for the twelve years he'd shared it. He should have insisted on somewhere neutral. 

He sipped the wine and closed his eyes in pleasure. He'd never been in a position to benefit from Avon's connoisseur tastes before, having sworn off alcohol many years before he started sleeping with the man. He wondered what Avon thought of his change of heart. 

Avon was still waiting.Tarrant took a deep breath. 

"You screwed up."

"Is that it?"

"That's the heart of it. I know why you lied to Blake.You wanted to get me out and you needed his help. But you didn't have to keep on lying."

"It was easier." Avon said.

"That was the screw up." He drank some more of the wine and waited. 

Avon's face had darkened but Tarrant could tell he was thinking. 

"All right," he said finally. "That was a mistake."

Not enough. "And the consequences?" 

"You want me to admit that what happened to you was my fault?"

"That would be a start." He suspected pigs would fly first, but it was still what he needed to hear. 

Avon drained his glass and poured himself another. "Very well. Lying to Blake was the simplest way to get him to do what I needed. If I'd told him the truth that would mean issues and arguments that I didn't need. I didn't see the push back about the clones coming, and I didn't react fast enough when it did. I assumed it just meant that they'd be sure to keep you alive until we got to you."

"So?"

"So, yes, my misjudgements directly contributed to your injuries."

That was what he'd wanted. He wondered why getting it didn't make him feel better.

"An apology would seem to be otiose." Avon said 

"Why not try one anyway?"

Close to breaking point, Blake had said. And he was pushing at every vulnerability that Avon had.

"Is this your idea of payback?"

"I'm not after revenge. I'm trying to figure out if we're going to be able to have any sort of relationship, working or otherwise, from here on in." 

"Which depends on my apologising. An ultimatum, then."

Tarrant wasn't ready for anything that final. He didn't even know what outcome he wanted, except to stay on Liberator, and even that seemed less important right now than not screwing this up in the way he feared that he'd already done.

"I think it's more of an outside chance."

Avon sighed. "I thought that when your depression lifted these feelings of injustice might do the same. I should have remembered your remarkable capacity to hold a grudge."

"That isn't helping," Tarrant told him.

"No, I suppose it isn't. I was missing you. I was unbelievably frustrated that I didn't have the resources to find out where you'd been sent. Screwing with Blake's head was a distraction, a pathetic piece of entertainment, and it came within a few heartbeats of getting you killed. I'm sorry."

Tarrant managed not to say any of the first few things that came into his head. This wasn't the moment for even the most gentle mockery of his husband, who had never as he could recall ever apologised to him directly for anything before. 

"Then as far as I'm concerned the matter's done with," he said. "I think I could probably manage a little more wine if it's on offer."

Avon stood to refill his glass. "Am I going to finally find out what you're like when tipsy?"

"Not today," Tarrant said, trying not to let the unexpected flicker of regret into his voice. "Professional ethics and a healthy sense of self preservation both require that a pilot stay sober while en route to mysterious assignations."

"Pity," Avon said. "Well, at least I don't have to drink alone any more."

"I'd appreciate it," Tarrant said carefully, "if you didn't talk about this in front of Blake. He knows I'm not teetotal any more but I'm not drinking around him, obviously."

"I see," Avon said. "All these years sober and you still don't trust him around alcohol?"

"It's not about trust. It's just considerate. He doesn't want to start drinking again and I don't want to make that choice any harder for him,"

"We'll drink on our own, then."

Tarrant put down the glass. It had emptied much faster than he'd intended. "I'd better get some sleep while the ship's on automatic."

"Is Blake waiting for you?"

"Not tonight."

"Then you could stay here."

"Not tonight," he said again. "Give me a chance to figure things out."

Avon walked to the door with him. When he spoke again his voice was unusually diffident. "Did Blake tell you that I propositioned him?"

Tarrant stopped. "You did what?"

"It was after we'd found out you were on Saturn. The news from the hospital was bleak, I'd watched the video of them beating you too many times and there was nothing I could do but sit and wait for your transfer date. I drank and fretted and eventually I decided that between us we could maybe conjure up something of you. Being neither particularly sensible nor sober at that point, I went and hammered on his door."

"What did he say?"

"He made me some strong coffee and told me a couple of stories I'd never heard before about you getting out of some equally tight spots. I went to sleep on his sofa, left quietly in the morning before he woke up and neither of us ever referred to it again. I thought he might have told you, though."

"No," Tarrant said. "Not a word."

"Then I suppose I needn't have mentioned it. He never was any good at pressing his advantage."

"He never needed to," Tarrant said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"It would help if we knew what we were looking out for." Tarrant complained.

"If all goes well, a mid-size personal cruiser," Avon said

"Armaments?" Blake asked.

"Enough to make pirates think twice. At full power and close range they'd barely dent our shields."

"And if all doesn't go well?" Tarrant already had his eyes on the screen.

"The usual, I imagine. A fleet of heavily armed pursuit ships. If you see those, don't feel obliged to consult me first. Just run."

"I hope this is worth it," Tarrant muttered. With just three days to his third race he really ought to be out on the practice runs. 

"You didn't have to follow me," Avon pointed out. 

"And if we hadn't, that fleet of pursuit ships would have blown your tiny and barely armed ship to smithereens."

"I'm not expecting the pursuit ships," Avon said. "I'm expecting the cruiser. This is merely that heads up you wanted."

It felt a little anticlimactic when the cruiser finally appeared on the screens. 

"This is Liberator," Avon hailed them. "Moving within teleport range." 

"You might as well tell us who's on board." Blake said. "If you don't I'll just ask Orac."

"A very old acquaintance of yours," Avon said. "I asked him to look into a certain matter and he's here to deliver his report."

"Fine, don't tell me. Orac?"

Avon laughed. "You are impatient today. You could have let me have my small surprise. It's Carnell."

Blake frowned. "I though he retired years ago. What on earth do you want with a psychostrategist?"

Tarrant knew that Blake had had dealings with Carnell when he was President, though Blake hadn't said much about them except that the discipline was massively overrated.

"You'll find out soon enough. Tell the crew I'll be teleporting over in ten minutes with a bracelet for him."

Carnell had aged more visibly that either of his husbands, Tarrant thought. His hair was more white than grey and there were deep lines in his face. His handshake was firm, however, and he was looking round the flight deck with avid curiosity.

“History is a tangle of extraordinary events,” he said. “It’s remarkable how many of them happened right here.”

“Do you have something for us?” Avon asked a tad impatiently

“Yes of course.” He pulled out a data chip from his pocket and displayed it on his palm.

“Might we have the executive summary?” Blake asked politely.

Carnell smiled. “Certainly. Though I’d strongly recommend that you view the whole report before taking any actions based on it.

“The problem, as you know,” he smiled at Tarrant in a ‘we both know that you don’t know but let’s stick with the pretence’ sort of way, “is how to establish social acceptance and long term safety for the cloned children in both IndSys and Republic society.”

That had been Avon’s question? Tarrant had expected something far more self-centred.

“The answer,” Carnell said, “is familiarisation and sympathy. You can’t use the actual children, of course; you don’t have access to them, they’d be put at risk from the publicity, you’d be accused of exploitation and I'm afraid thirteen is a particularly unphotogenic age.”

“So?” Avon asked.

“So their story needs to be dramatized.”

Avon frowned at that. “We’re not actors.”

“You have proven quite capable of being a consummate actor, Kerr Avon,” Carnell said cheerfully. “But not this time. None of you three has a good reputation in the Republic and it’s not much better in Indsys. Your skills won’t be needed this time. Your roles will be subsidiary and played by actors.”

“I don’t want to seem arrogant,” Tarrant said, “but I don’t see how any of our roles could be presented as supplemental. Not in this case. We did rescue them."

“That’s because you are arrogant,” Carnell said. “There were four people on the ship when you found the capsules. You were racing to rescue the fifth. This is the story of an expectant mother who finds thirty lost babies. It’s the story of the last known clone in the galaxy who discovers that she’s not unique after all. It’s not your story, any of you. It’s theirs. At least this version will be theirs.”

“That doesn’t sound like particularly interesting drama," Tarrant said.

“He’s right, though, Del," Blake said. “It’s about generating empathy and we’ve all got far too much baggage. Can you guarantee this will work, Carnell?”

“If you follow my instructions. Manipulating an entire population is usually simpler than getting one person to definitely change their mind, though the fact that there were two different populations here made it a little trickier.”

He still had the chip in his hand. That bit of psychostrategy was familiar to anyone who’d spent much of their life trading. “What were you offered as payment?” Tarrant asked warily.

“Three hours with Orac,” Carnell said.

“Supervised,” Avon added. “He isn’t to be left alone with it at any point.”

“That seems reasonable,” Blake said.

“I’m glad it meets with your approval,“ Avon said, somewhat curtly, resting a possessive hand on the computer’s casing. “Shall we get on with it?”

  
The data that Carnell wanted from Orac turned out to be excruciatingly boring. Tarrant sat and drummed his heels, metaphorically and occasionally literally, and thought about races and Avon. He was glad of the break when after an hour Carnell sat back with the newly delivered coffee. 

“You look like a man who wants to talk," his visitor said amicably. 

“I suppose you know why I volunteered for this.”

“You didn’t want either of your husbands asking me questions about your relationships,” Carnell said cheerfully. “And now you’re trying to decide whether to ask them yourself.”

“Should I? You know the outcome, presumably. Is it in my interest?”

“I’m not psychic,” Carnell said. “To calculate the outcome of any particular situation I have to obtain and run the data.”

“And have you run it for us?”

Carnell sipped at his coffee. “No.”

Tarrant didn’t believe him for a moment. He also suspected that Carnell hadn’t been trying to be convincing. He was being warned off asking questions, though whether for his own benefit or for Carnell’s he couldn’t tell. 

But then if the psychostrategist intended to lie to them for his own benefit or that of whoever he was working for, there was little that any of them could do to force the truth from him. It was a matter of either trusting him or rejecting everything he told them.

“Blake said you were retired,” he said. “When did you stop working for the Republic?”

“I didn’t work for the Republic,” Carnell said, “any more than I worked for the Federation before that. I let them pay me a great deal of money and I gave them advice that met their immediate needs whilst advancing my long-term objectives. Any psychostrategist who claims genuine allegiance to any specific organisation is lying.”

“And what are your long-term objectives?” Tarrant asked.

“Simply the establishment of a galactic society that is pleasant for me to live in.”

Tarrant decided that Carnell's self-satisfaction was really annoying. “How does the clone issue fit in with that?”  
  
"The clones are a potential flashpoint between the Republic and IndSys. War tends to bring with it restrictions on travel and shortages of luxury goods. I'm fond of both. You don't approve."

"How could anyone approve? It's power without responsibility."

"Isn't that what possession of this ship has always given you?"

"We did what we thought we right. We didn't set out to feather our own nests."  
  
"Really? No, I don't think any of us are that different. Now if you've no more questions my three hours are ticking away."

"Just one," Tarrant said. "Why did Avon ask you about the clones?"

"You don't need a psychostrategist to answer that one. Ask him yourself."  
  



	13. Last Word

"So how did you like our guest?" Avon asked.

"Not at all, and I'm glad he's off the ship," Tarrant said. They were on a course back to Frais at standard by nine, which should give him three hours or so on the practice runs before dark. "He made me wonder how many of our crises over the years have had puppeteers behind them."

"He's the last of a dying breed." Avon said. "We might as well benefit from his abilities."

"Are we sure that we're benefitting, though? Is it wise to trust him?"

"Not blindly. But what I've seen of his proposals make sense."

"I haven't really worked out yet why you asked him for a solution at all. Kai and the other clones weren't your problem."

"They were standing between me and a quiet life," Avon said."Blake's previous attempts to interfere on their behalf were disastrous. Since he's obviously going to insist on trying to save them again, it might as well be in a way that gets the job done this time."

It sounded almost plausible if you didn't know Avon, whose method of dealing with courses of action that he thought unnecessary did not tend to involve helpful proposals for improvement. Tarrant rather suspected that Avon was doing this primarily to keep him happy, which under normal circumstances would be only slightly less unlikely. 

These weren't normal circumstances, of course, witnessed by the fact that Avon had apologised to him. It suddenly hit him that this was Avon fighting to save their marriage, and with an intensity that was frankly astonishing from someone who couldn’t even bring themselves to say "I love you".

He tucked the idea away to think about later. 

"You're back early."

Tarrant stepped down from the teleport. "Second place means no compulsory interviews, so I skipped the reception."

"Did you throw the race, then?"

"Never in my life. But second worked out well this time. Semi finals in three days."

He strolled with Avon up to the galley. "I'm having a day off flying tomorrow."

"Are you? I suppose that I might have your company this evening, then? There's another bottle of that wine."

"I was rather hoping there might be. Let me have a word with Blake and then I'll join you."

Blake was deep in conversation with Orac about the contents of Carnell's data chip. He greeted Tarrant with rather distracted affection.

"Well done on the race result. How soon after the final do you think we can leave Frais? I don't want to drag you away but we need to find Cally."

"As soon as you like," Tarrant said. "I don't care about all the championship stuff. I'm just doing it for the racing. If it's really urgent I can drop out now."

"It's not that urgent," Blake conceded. "You can carry on enjoying yourself."

"Talking of which, I'll be in Avon's rooms this evening."

"And overnight?"

"Possibly."

Blake stood up to look at him properly. " I was right, then, to kick you out for the week."

"Perhaps. I’m not altogether sure yet."

"Well, I hope you work things out between you. I won't disturb you unless the world is ending."

"Something occurred to me, rather later than it should have." Avon passed him the wine. "If you've been abstaining around Blake, your drinking must have been on your own. How many bottles are there in your rooms?"

"Right now? A couple, both unopened," Tarrant said. "Alcohol and flyer racing don't mix well."

"And before you took up racing again?"

"A few more, I suppose. I didn't have a problem, if that's what you're getting at. I just wasn't particularly happy. The racing works a lot better as a cure for that than the wine did."

"You've never been any good at being on your own," Avon said. "That's why I knew you'd go back to Blake."

"Just Blake?"

"The odds hadn't been looking good for me."

"No, I guess not. It's been difficult."

"So I gathered."

There was a silence after that; not, Tarrant thought, particularly hostile, but more as if nether of then were entirely sure where to go next.

"I think that I want this back," he said finally. "I'm not sure it will work, and I'm not sure how or when I'm going to be sure. But I wouldn't be here otherwise."

"That was my working hypothesis," Avon said. "But I'm glad to have it confirmed."

Tarrant settled into the sofa. "What do _you_ want? Something different, or just to carry on where we left off?" 

"Was there something wrong with that?"

That was Avon's prickly voice. Tarrant considered his answer carefully. "Not from my perspective. But we didn't talk about things much. That's the way misunderstandings can arise."

"I'm not Blake," Avon said. "I don't do heart-to-hearts." 

"I had noticed that. All right, but the offer's always there." He had felt that he ought to make the suggestion but he wasn't sure what he'd have done if Avon had taken him up on it. Talking to Avon about how he felt about Blake would be almost impossible. 

"That's not the kind of offer I'm interested in right now." Avon said. "Do I have to get you properly inebriated first or shall we finish the bottle afterwards?"

It was said in Avon's most casual drawl but Tarrant could see the tension in the way his fingers were curling into his palm. Decision time.

"I don't want to be drunk," he said. "I want to feel everything. Bed."

The thumbs digging into his shoulders were going to leave bruises. Tarrant didn't care. He wanted every sensation just as sharp as it could be.

Avon was looking down at him, his movements slow and forceful, a slight catch in every deep breath. "Say it then," he suggested. 

Tarrant dug his own nails into the man's hips. "I love you."

"Don't forget it again," Avon said. "I might not wait a year for you to remember next time."

"Arrogant sod." He shifted slightly to accommodate the man better. "Might have known this was all my fault."

"Next time don't turn down my escape plan."

"Next time get off your arse and visit me occasionally!"

He was fairly sure that he only got the last word in because Avon had just become extremely distracted.

The crowd was huge and noisy. A large cluster of media drones danced above him. Tarrant knew that most of them were here for the open final on next but an audience was an audience and he'd spent much of his life making the most of being the warm up act. 

He glanced over to the VIP stand to see if Vila was there. His husbands had got a message back from Cally and had taken the ship to see her. Blake had sworn to do his best to get back for this but he hadn't heard from them so he'd assumed something must have come up.

There was Vila, and Blake beside him to Tarrant's surprise and pleasure. Then Cally, watching the course intently, and to his astonishment Dayna, her head thrown back in laughter and at the end of the row Avon had his head bowed to read a tablet as if he were in his sitting room at home. 

Tarrant blew then all kisses and jogged happily to his waiting flyer. 

"What?" he mouthed to the white tiles on the ceiling.

"Don't try to move," Blake said from beside him, "You've got a broken neck and a long list of other injuries. Avon and Dayna are trying to fix the teleport so that we can get you straight into the med unit."

"What?" he said again, even more weakly, being more confused than before. He couldn't move, being encased in some sort of plastic, and everything felt numb from the chin down. 

"Your flyer hit a drone that had strayed onto the course. There's not anything left of the flyer I'm afraid. There's an urgent investigation into how the drone got there, but we'll be conducting our own enquiries once you're safe on the ship. In case it wasn't just an accident Cally's outside this room with a gun and Liberator's in low orbit with Vila manning the weapons."

He thought about this as well as his fuzzy brain could manage.  
"Who won?"

"No idea, I'm afraid. The race was suspended. I think they were going to restart it after the open final but by then I was in here with you."

His beautiful little flyer was gone, and he'd missed his last chance at the cup. "Damn," he breathed, and closed his eyes again. 

"Are you awake yet?"

Blake's voice again. He opened his eyes and found that yes, he was awake, properly this time. He was curled up between fresh sheets in the bed he shared with Blake. 

Tarrant pushed himself up to sit. "Everything fixed? How long have I been under?"

"Yes, and four days. If you're feeling up to it would you join us on the flight deck?"

Blake's voice was tense, even though Tarrant felt fine. He dressed and followed his husband, curious about what could be up.

The first thing he saw was that four consoles were occupied. Nothing needed four, surely? Blake walked over to take the fifth. 

Everyone was looking at him now, and not a smile among them. Had he done something terribly wrong?

“Welcome back,” Avon said. "Just in time for the show. Dayna?”

“Set,” she said from the pilot’s seat.

“Vila?”

“Ready,” from the weapons console.

What the hell was going on? “Where are we?”

“Earth,” Dayna said. “Blake?”

“All set,” he said from communications. 

“Cally?”

Shields and scan, “Yes.” 

“What’s happening?” Tarrant demanded.

“Sit down and watch.” Blake gestured to the seating at the edge of the flight deck. “We’ve got this.”

Tarrant sat down. 

“Zen, open Republic senior military comms channels,“ Blake said. “This is Roj Blake of Liberator. Your Military Intelligence division has broken numerous Republic and IndSys laws, most recently in kidnapping a child and attempting to assassinate ex-Commander Del Tarrant. Since the Republic is apparently unwilling or unable to apply the Iaw to restrain it, we are acting to remove the threat to ourselves and our allies. Close channels.”

“Stationary orbit at one hundred thousand metres above Installation One,” Dayna said.

“Weapons, Vila?

“Charged and ready.”

“Zen. Remove camouflage.”

“Camouflage removed.”

Liberator had just appeared in extremely low Earth orbit, far beyond the reach of the spaceward planetary defences. The Republic must be in full panic mode.

“Fire,” Blake said.

The buildings on the screen exploded in fire and smoke.

“Now let’s get out of here."  
  
  
Tarrant said nothing until the ship was clear of the straggling pursuit and on a course back to Frais at standard by ten. He didn’t want to distract anyone who was trying to keep them alive. Once they were out of any immediate danger, however, and only Avon and Blake remained on the flight deck, he couldn’t keep silent.

“How many people did you just kill?”

“Eighteen,” Avon said. “Including Gentian. We can provide you with a list of names and resumes if you like.”

“We went through this before you woke up,” Blake said. “Military Intelligence has been corrupting the Republic military from within for decades. If we’d picked off Gentian, one of his subordinates would have taken over and nothing would have changed. We’ve taken out the heart of it instead. Trust me, no-one in that building was any sort of innocent.”

“And now they know about the camouflage.”

“Yes,” Blake said. “That should keep them honest for a while. If we don’t use it they won’t have a chance to work out how it’s done. They’ll just know that we can do it.”

“But you attacked an Earth military installation! This makes Liberator a legitimate military target now. What happened to our quiet retirement?”

“They tried to kill you,” Avon said. “That drone was MI. A response was necessary and we gave them one.”

Tarrant shook his head, unbelieving. “If we go back to Frais this could mean war. Or, more likely, IndSys deciding that we’re way more trouble than we are worth and banning us from their systems to keep the Republic happy. And what about Dayna and the others?”

“No one knows they were on board,” Blake said. “There’s no need for them to get mixed up in the consequences.”

“You could have done it without them, apart from Dayna, maybe. Why on earth did they agree to be part of this lunacy?”

Blake sighed. “We all saw you hit that drone on the big screen. It was a hell of an explosion; until they found your body we thought you had to be dead. When we said that we were going after the murderous bastard who’d done it there was no shortage of volunteers. You have friends, Del.”

“I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t! What a bloody mess! You could have woken me up and asked my professional military opinion on the likely consequences before you did it.”

“It will be all right,” Blake said comfortably. “We have Liberator. We can look after ourselves.” 

“For once I agree with Blake,” Avon said. “The Republic will bluster but they can’t touch us. IndSys won’t want to antagonise us. The whole thing will blow over. Gentian had to die and this was the simplest way to do it.”

“I hope you’re right. I suspect you aren’t though.” Tarrant said. “What about Carnell’s plans? Hasn’t this blown a hole in them?”

“Not really. We were never a vital part of them. Now Dayna’s agreed to be involved we can leave that to her and Cally for now.”

Neither of them were going to admit that this had been a mistake, at least not until the consequences hit. Tarrant gave the argument up for now. "You'd better tell me how you talked Dayna round," he said. "And what the plan is when we get to Frais."


	14. Saviours

  
Leading the news items again. His younger self would have been pleased, Tarrant thought. He'd always had this nagging fear that his life would turn out to be ordinary.  
  
He'd rather fancied ending up as more of an elder statesman though, dispensing advice and reminiscences of derring-do to admiring younger generations. Instead he was nearing sixty years old and marked as a escaped convict and terrorist, running from an act of terror against the same military establishment that he'd worked so hard to establish. And he hadn't even won the damn competition.  
  
Around him Blake and Avon were discussing what to do next in perfect amity, as if fire and death were the two things in their lives that they could agree upon. If either of them had any doubts about what they'd done they hid them completely.  
  
Gentian was dead. That was one thing. And Military Intelligence was gone. Tarrant wasn't naive - the Republic would have other covert ops - but with any luck they wouldn't be as obsessed with covering up MI's past misdeeds. Herios was dead in the explosion too, so Avon said. Their deal hadn't done either of them any good in the end.  
  
Eighteen dead and none of them innocent. It wasn't so much in the grand scheme of things. When he had been Commander of the Republic he'd made decisions that risked a thousand times as many. Before that, when they'd fought the Federation, they'd taken enemy lives whenever necessary. And before that, when he'd been a Federation officer, there had been Saturn, and that hasn't been all.  
  
But somewhere along the line he'd stopped thinking like a soldier, and the Republic, for all its faults, was not a second Federation. If it was insular, greedy and aggressive it was because the people of Earth had voted for an insular, greedy, aggressive government and they could vote it out again if they chose. They couldn't be liberated by force from their own bad decisions.  
  
"What are we?" he asked aloud.  
  
There was a puzzled silence. "Context?" Blake finally asked.   
  
"Are we soldiers, freedom fighters, terrorists? Rebels or our own nation state? Are we at war with the Republic? What are our goals? Who are our allies? What are our terms of engagement? Are we out for revenge? Or are we just doing whatever we choose because we have the power to get away with it?"  
  
"You've been watching too many news broadcasts," Avon said. "Those sound like their categories, not ours."  
  
"So what are ours? Presumably we have reasons for our actions - what are they?"  
  
"I don't need any particular political philosophy to kill someone because they try to kill you," Avon said.  
  
"So it's personal."  
  
"Of course it's personal," Avon retorted.  
  
"Not just personal," Blake protested. "MI were out of control."  
  
"They've been out of control for decades, and you take them out four days after they attack me. I think we should go back to Earth. After we've dropped the others off, of course."  
  
"And do what? Give ourselves up? There's a 15 year jail term waiting for me and do you really want to go back to the Saturn camp?"  
  
"Of course not. But we could try to make peace with them. We won them their revolution. You were their president for ten years. There must be common ground."  
  
"I tried that," Blake said. "The speech at the end of our trial- I did my absolute best. And they rejected it."  
  
"A handful of jurors rejected it, and it took them days of deliberation to do so. I think we should try again. But it has to be done from Earth, not IndSys."  
  
"The last time we went there for peace talks the good people of Earth did their best to hang you by the neck from the palace balcony." Avon said. "My vote is strongly against trying that again. I don't remember this angst when we rescued Cally from MI. We left plenty of bodies then."  
  
"That was a rescue," Tarrant said. "This time I was already safe on Liberator when you acted. Don't get me wrong. I'm not mourning any of those particular dead. But I really don't know what we are, apart from three middle-aged men in a warship who do whatever we like."  
  
"You want to be part of a Cause," Blake suggested.  
  
"I'm quite happy not being," Tarrant said."I've spent my life following causes, or at least following you following causes. Retirement is rather nice. But I think if we're going to blow things up then yes, it should be for something and not just because we can."  
  
"I'm satisfied with revenge as a motivation, personally." Avon said. "It's not as if we make a habit of slaughtering bystanders. Any one who leaves us alone gets left alone."  
  
"That does seem like a reasonable position," Blake agreed. "What does this have to do with going back to Earth, Del?"  
  
"I've been listening to the broadcasts. Earth thinks it knows exactly who we are. We're the enemy. The people don't know anything about what MI was up to, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. What they do care about is that Liberator attacked Earth, their home, the one place they have always been told was impregnable, and we did it in the most terrifying way imaginable, appearing out of nowhere to rain fire from the sky. They think we hate them."  
  
"We've been unpopular there for half our lives," Blake said.   
  
"Unpopular, yes. Highly suspect for our links to IndSys. Criminal. Treacherous, even. But ordinary Earth people have never been genuinely terrified at the prospect of Liberator appearing in the skies before, or at least not since Servalan's propaganda."  
  
"That sounds like a reason to stay clear of the place," Avon said.   
  
"You have to care about this!" Tarrant appealed to Blake. "This is our legacy, but it's also the future. There are plenty of politicians and rabble rousers who want to re-establish the Federation. If they can convince the people that the Revolution was a sinister plot led by Earth's enemies- meaning us-, what's to stop them succeeding?"  
  
He'd got Blake's attention now. The man was shaking his head slowly. "We can't just go back to Earth. They'll fire on us rather than listen."  
  
"We have to find a way."  
  
"Yes," Blake's voice was tired. "I suppose that we do."  
  
  
  
  
“Anyone got any ideas?” Blake brought the two coffees back to the sofas. Avon already had a glass of wine in his hand.  
  
They’d rendezvoused with Dayna’s ship and dropped the others off. Now they were nowhere in particular, considering what to do next.   
  
The chatter coming out of Frais hadn’t encouraged them to go back to their home port quite yet. The revelation of Liberator’s camouflage abilities and their attack on Earth was generating a lot of unhappy noise among their supposed allies.  
  
“Don’t ask me,” Avon said. “I’m only here to veto the stupidest suggestions.”  
  
“I’ve got the start of an idea,” Tarrant said. “But it needs some work.”  
  
“Go on then,” Blake said.  
  
“Liberator needs to save the Earth.”  
  
“From what?”  
  
“That’s the bit that needs work. Maybe something will turn up?”  
  
“That’s really not helpful,” Blake said.  
  
“It might not be the stupidest suggestion," Avon spoke up. “A large enough interstellar object, for instance, at really high speed might have too much momentum for Earth to deal with, but Liberator could take it out.”  
  
“Except that there isn’t anything on course for Earth.” Blake said.  
  
“There could be,” Avon said. “With a bit of unostentatious preliminary work on our part. It might take a few months to set up, but we could do it.”  
  
Blake was shaking his head. “There are billions of people on Earth. What if we can’t stop it? We could wipe out half the human race in an attempt to make ourselves look good. That’s not the legacy I’m after.”  
  
“If we don’t do something, all those billions of people will end up living under the Federation Mark 2.” Tarrant pointed out. “We’ll figure out some safeguards as we go along.”  
  
"This would just be a lie!"  
  
"We've told then the truth for thirty years, and they hate us for it." Tarrant said. "One white lie won't hurt."   
  
"A white lie? The threat of destruction of the Earth! No. Absolutely not. This whole idea is utterly unacceptable." Blake thumped his mug down hard enough to spill the contents. "Think of something else!"  
  
  
  
  
  
After two months of prodding, pulling and an awful lot of pushing, interrupted by the need to take Liberator for regular appearances elsewhere to avoid suspicion, Baby had attained her final velocity.   
  
Avon had tried to forbid the use of pet names for the half mile diameter rock in case they accidentally slipped when talking to the Republic later. Officially she was Target One. Unofficially she was Tarrant's baby.   
  
Not even remotely symmetrical along any axis and made up of an unholy amalgam of rocks and metals, she had been a real pig to move around but by now Tarrant had an instinct for her bizarre dynamics that he considered better than Orac's calculations. Both he and the computer were now agreed that she was on course for Venus at about 10% of light speed. Just 24 hours now until she started to show up on Sol scans. Less than 72 hours after that until impact.  
  
They were all getting some sleep before the fun started, or at least that was the idea.  
  
"Do come to bed," Tarrant said, rather wearily. He'd been saying it for the last half hour.  
  
"I wish I could be certain that this is the right thing to do." Blake was still pacing around their living room.   
  
"Never mind about right. It's necessary. You know that."   
  
"Yes. Still, I'd be happier if it wasn't based on deception and causing apocalyptic terror."  
  
"We all would, but we're past that stage. Something's got to change, and this will change it, Roj."  
  
"Unless it goes wrong."  
  
"It won't. And even if it did, we've got it all covered. No one will get hurt. At the absolute worst Venus will just need a bit more terraforming, and it won't come to that. Bed, please. I really need some sleep before tomorrow."  
  
Despite his misgivings, Blake fell asleep rapidly. It was Tarrant who lay awake for much longer, his arm around his husband's waist, worrying. Not about Baby, but the long term consequences of persuading Blake to lie on this scale. If the scheme worked. If there were no casualties. If no one detected the nature of the fraud then everything might be all right. Despite what he'd said to Blake they were all quite big ifs, still.   
  
It was a couple more hours before he slept.  
  
  
  
"The President's been notified," Avon said. "We've got a clip of the briefing for the news channels. Distributing the target coordinates to the other observatories now."  
  
The trickiest bit of their plan turned out to be making sure that the people of Earth and Venus found out about Target One. Both military and politicians had a habit of covering up imminent disaster for as long as possible.  
  
They'd had to wait a long six hours from first sighting until the point at which so many people knew about Baby that the leak could have come from almost anywhere. They would now wait another hour for all the major observatories to confirm the sighting at the provided coordinates, then the presidential clip would go directly to the news broadcasters, including the Venusian ones. The Republic still had a free press and no government in crisis could hush up information that a thousand journalists had direct evidence for.  
  
Liberator couldn't arrive on the scene until the looming catastrophe was public knowledge and the military had had time to tell the President that it was outside their capacity to deal with. Several more hours, Avon reckoned. They weren't tight for time yet but they'd all be much happier doing something to stop Baby rather than waiting while she whizzed towards the homes of half a million people.   
  
  
  
"They've declared full evacuation with immediate effect," Avon said.  
  
"About time!" Blake looked both exasperated and relieved.   
  
Venus's terraforming had never been entirely successful and every century or so some error in the complex system triggered environmental catastrophe. As a result it was the only planet in the Solar System with a relatively small population and a regularly updated plan for total planetary evacuation. It had made Venus the obvious target for Baby.   
  
It had seemed for a few hours that no one was going to bite the bullet and order the Venusians to leave, however. The cost would be phenomenal and virtually every ship in the system would be needed. To be fair to the President, he couldn't both evacuate and continue to launch the power of the fleet against the incoming rock. His advisors must have finally persuaded him that it was unstoppable and the planet was lost.  
  
"We're running behind schedule," Blake said. "We should go in now."  
  
"We can't," Tarrant said, "Half the war fleet is still circling Baby. We won't get close. Wait until they come back to pick up the refugees."  
  
Secretly he was as desperate as Blake to get started. They'd run thousands of simulations on Liberator's upcoming intervention, and thousands more on the neutron bomb at Baby's heart that would, as a last intervention, channel its energy into pushing her off course.  
  
By unspoken agreement they hadn't run even one on the effect of her impact on Venus. Conservation of energy and momentum couldn't be sidestepped. Even if the collision didn't tear a lump off the planet itself the atmosphere would heat up to unmanageable levels and the floating habitats that had been painstakingly terraformed over many centuries would be utterly destroyed. Nobody who left Venus today would ever be able to go home.  
  
"We're not short of time yet. Another couple of hours and most of the fleet will be out of our way." He hoped. At the moment hope and wait was all he could do.  
  
  
  
  
"Extreme priority message to all ships in the region. This is Del Tarrant of Liberator. For your own safety move at least one hundred thousand spacials from the extra-solar object immediately and maintain your distance. Repeat, maintain a distance of one hundred thousand spacials until further notice. Liberator will be commencing extremely high energy operations to deflect the object starting in twenty one minutes. The safety of any vessel inside this area cannot be guaranteed."  
  
That got a incoherent babble of queries from the hundred or so ships still clustering around Baby. Tarrant left Blake to sort them out and pass on anything that he might need to know. The alert message was on repeat with a count down to the deadline. Everything out there was capable of getting the hell out of his way in well under twenty minutes. If they didn't he couldn't wait around any longer.   
  
Avon was conducting close up scans of the object. The fleet had been firing at it and sending unmanned ships to crash into its surface for a good eight hours or so. They hadn't shifted it so much as a thousandth of a percent off course but Tarrant wanted to know exactly how its dimensions and spin had been changed before Liberator started.  
  
If they'd genuinely only just come across Baby for the first time Liberator would have struggled to do any more than the fleet had achieved but they had the advantage of months of calculations by the best computer in the galaxy and, Tarrant firmly believed, the best pilot. All Orac and Tarrant needed now was these last minute updates and a recalculation.  
  
"Message from the Republic Senate. Stand down and surrender your ship." Blake said. "I'm telling them this is a humanitarian mission."   
  
"I need that scan," Tarrant told Avon  
  
"One minute."  
  
He glanced back at the main screen. The green blips were scattering, all except one.  
  
"What's that ship?"  
  
"Far Horizons." Blake said.  
  
Shit. That was the fleet’s ex-flagship, elderly now but still heavily armed and manned. "Get it out of the way."  
  
"I'm trying," Blake said. "They say we don't have authority to clear the area."  
  
"Keep trying."  
  
"Scan's ready." Avon said.  
  
Tarrant put it up on screen, the old profile superimposed on the new and examined it carefully.  
  
"No significant changes" he said after a few minutes. "Get Orac to confirm. Blake, that ship's still there."  
  
"New message direct from the President. Do we require any assistance?"  
  
"That's better. Tell them to move their bloody ship."  
  
"Relaying more politely," Blake said.   
  
"I'm going in."  
  
He'd practised this a hundred times, the constant shifts needed to match Baby's angular velocity so the ship hovered no more than a hundred metres above the spinning surface. Below him a deep fissure gaped, barely a hundred metres wide but half a mile deep.   
  
"Far Horizons is retreating." Avon said.   
  
One less thing to worry about.  
  
"Blake, close down comm and fire up weapons." They wouldn't have time for chatter. Three of them was the absolute minimum for this -weapons, navigation, scan.   
  
"Weapons fully charged," Blake said.  
  
"Avon? All clear?"  
  
"Confirmed."   
  
Here goes then, Tarrant thought. "Fire torpedoes at will."  
  
  
  
"Torpedo bay is empty." Blake said.  
  
"Scan?"  
  
The image appeared on the main screen, a hollow at what had been the bottom of the fissure, maybe two hundred metres across and full of vaporised rock.   
  
"How far to the lithium seam?"  
  
"Another forty metres." Avon said.  
  
"Torpedo bay reloading in ten minutes." Blake said.  
  
"Switch to cannon for now. Everyone set?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Then fire."  
  
Energy blasted white hot from the ship.  
  
"Twenty metres," Avon said. "Ten. Five. We're through."  
  
There was a sudden white-out and the ship shuddered  
  
"Shields!" Tarrant shouted, too late. The screens were down, the alarms sounded and Tarrant was abruptly flying blind. Instinctively he tried to pulled the ship up and away from the surface but he could feel no response,  
  
"Zen, Damage report." Avon demanded.  
  
"Damage to all external systems," Zen said. "Internal systems unaffected."  
  
That gave them comms and teleport but no weapons, scan, shields or engines. An unpredicted explosion of vaporised rock and lithium had engulfed the ship, pushing it away from Baby.  
  
"Zen. How long to repair?" Avon asked.  
  
"Eight hours to minimum functionality."  
  
Much too long. They stared at each other in despair.  
  
"Far Horizons," Tarrant said suddenly. "She carries fifty torpedoes. That should be enough."  
  
"She's not nearly massive enough for the final push, " Avon said.  
  
"So we forget everything else for now, just focus on getting our engines up and running and shields back so we can do that bit."  
  
"You do know that we're currently dead in the water?" Avon said. "A handful of those torpedoes would be enough to destroy us."   
  
"How's the latest word on the evacuation, Roj?"  
  
"They expect it to be 99.5% complete before impact."  
  
Half a percent of 500,000 people was far too many. He didn't need to say that aloud.   
  
"There's still the bomb," Avon said.  
  
"Nowhere in the galaxy is going to be far enough away for us to hide if that goes off," Blake said. "No-one out there is completely stupid. I'll open a channel to Far Horizons. You'd better tell then what we need them to do."  
  
  
  
  
"How badly damaged are you?"  
  
He knew that voice. General Deleris was second in charge of the Fleet but had her promotions long past his time. They'd never met.   
  
"Repairs are underway, but we're short of time." Tarrant explained the plan and their problem. "You've got torpedoes; they should be enough. Can you position yourself exactly where Liberator was?"  
  
A pause. "My pilot says it's impossible to stay that close."  
  
Tarrant sighed. "I'll do the piloting. I've flown that ship before. Come close in and ready the torpedoes. I'll teleport across."  
  
The other two were staring at him.  
  
"You might never make it back," Blake said.   
  
Tarrant shrugged. "Needs must. If they put me back in prison you'll just have to come and rescue me again. Just get those engines fixed fast as you can."  
  
Tarrant materialised on the Far Horizons flight deck to a bristle of weapons. He showed them his empty hands.   
  
"General Deleris. May I please take your pilot's seat? We have very little time before the seam cools again.  
  
She looked at him for moment, frowning, then nodded. "I need hardly warn you that if anything happens to this ship there will be severe consequences."  
  
"Noted." He was already talking to the pilot. The guns were still pointing at him but he didn't have time to argue about them.   
  
Sliding into the vacated seat, he did a quick familiarisation with the controls. The ship had been upgraded a few times since it had been the pride of his fleet.  
  
"Got it. Who's on weapon control?"  
  
"I am." Deleris said. "Don't look so surprised, ex-Commander Tarrant. You weren't the only hands-on officer in the Fleet, and I'm not having my people take your orders."   
  
"As long as you're competent I don't care if you're the President himself," Tarrant said."I'm taking the ship in now. Could you please clear everyone off the flight deck who doesn't need to be here?"  
  
There was now only one gun pointed at him, which was an improvement. The piloting was tricky enough- Far Horizons was no Liberator. He had to settle with a position rather further out than he really wanted.   
  
"Can you get the torpedoes to the bottom of that chasm? If they explode on impact with the walls going down they'll be useless."  
  
"I can do that," Deleris said. "If the ship stays in position."  
  
"Fire when ready, then."  
  
  
  
"Ceasing firing," Deleris said eventually.  
  
Tarrant pulled the ship away from its precarious position and sat back with a sigh of relief.  
  
"Scan?"  
  
That was encouraging. Where the seam of lithium had run there was now a latticework of empty space stretching a mile and a half under the surface of a large protrusion. One really good push in exactly the right place and a mountain a mile across would shear off completely.  
  
"Good job. I need to get an update from my ship."  
  
"I'll speak to them. Move away from the console to that seat, please."  
  
He looked at the gun and did what he was told.   
  
  
  
"Progressing," Blake said. "I'd like to speak to Tarrant."  
  
"Del Tarrant is currently detained," Deleris said.   
  
"Then undetain him," Avon voice came over sharply. "We can't finish this job without our pilot. Unless you think one runaway convict is worth more to your bosses than a planet?"  
  
"I don't care about his prison sentence," the General said. "I care about the destructive capacities of your rogue ship. I only have your word for the extent of the damage. If he's so vital I'm willing to exchange one hostage for another. If one of you comes over here, unarmed, he can go back."  
  
There was a silence. Tarrant could imagine them arguing.   
  
Finally Blake's voice came back. "Suspicion goes both ways. We're well aware of the Fleet's standing orders regarding Liberator. We came to help the people of Venus despite the considerable personal risk, but we can't do anything without sufficient crew. If you're prepared to send us a competent senior crew member who is willing to take orders, I'll take Tarrant's place."  
  
There was resistance, of course, but Blake was adamant that two people simply couldn't operate the damaged ship, and after all these years there was still so little public information about Liberator's operations that Deleris couldn't swear otherwise.  
  
Tarrant was not even remotely happy about the exchange. Time wasn't on their side, however. They had less than an hour to slide enough rock off Baby to change her velocity by at least 300 mm per second. Neither Avon nor Blake could handle the ship as he could. He had to be back there, which meant his husband had to hand himself over.   
  
  
  
"What's our status?" Tarrant came into the flight deck at a run and flung himself at the console.  
  
"Engines 80%, scan is visual only, shields 35%, weapons 12%. General Deleris I presume." Avon said. "Welcome to Liberator."   
  
"Far Horizons can provide scan," she said. "Where's your comm?"  
  
"Show her," Tarrant said. Her ship wouldn't follow his instructions. "You're now on scan and comm, General. Sit there and try to learn fast. Zen, record voice print Aurie Deleris, access to scan, short range communications, console and main screen only, voice print to be erased in three hours time."  
  
"Confirmed," Zen said.  
  
He tried not to think about what Blake might be experiencing. Surely the emergency would override anything else, that and their own hostage?  
  
There were the scan details that he needed. He pushed thoughts of Blake to one side and focused on the job in front of him.  
  
  
  
"Shields at 7%," Zen said.  
  
"Fractures showing across 80% of shear area." Deleris was reading off her ship's scan data. "One more big push might do it."  
  
"Hull integrity is at critical," Avon said. "One more push is likely to crack us right open."  
  
Tarrant looked at the red lines across his screen, and then up to the main screen showing the scan. He couldn't stop now.  
  
"Zen, isolate the flight deck and commence emergency atmospherics to this room until further notice."  
  
He pulled the ship back and round. "Tell Far Horizons what we're doing. We may need digging out of here if the hull collapses."  
  
"Noted," Deleris was all professional. Avon said nothing.  
  
"Oh, and tell Blake I love him." If the hull did collapse he didn't much rate their chances. The flight deck wasn't built for this,   
  
"Avon, all available shields to impact zone. Here we go..."  
  
  
  
  
Something was still functioning.

There was air and gravity, and dim red lights, but not a flicker from Zen and the consoles were dead. Orac lay silent on the floor with a long crack along his casing. Avon was sprawled next to him, equally silent, unconscious rather than dead, but Tarrant didn’t know what to do to help him.

The flight deck doors didn’t open, which might mean that the controls were broken but more likely that there was now cold vacuum on the other side. Tarrant had hoped briefly that the massive impact that had thrown them all across the deck had just been the shields failing rather than the hull, but as the hours stretched on he had given up on that particular hope.

No comms, no teleport. No scan, so they didn’t even know whether their last desperate collision had saved Venus. No controls for the neutron bomb, not that he was telling Deleris about that. She’d got broken ribs and likely a punctured lung so they weren’t talking much. No flight controls. No access to the rest of the ship.

He could feel the underlying spin; the ship had to be on Baby, probably embedded in the rock. With no timepiece they didn’t know how much of the 10 remaining hours to impact with Venus had passed, but he thought at least half of them. Deleris thought less.

Someone might dig them out. General Deleris was important to the Republic. He was important to Blake. Avon was important to him, but that wasn’t going to help the man any in this situation.

He pulled a couple of panels off the wall and poked around, but Liberator didn’t work like other ships. You couldn’t repair her; you could only help her repair herself. There was no indication that auto repairs were happening, but he hoped.

This had been a terrible plan. At least Blake would survive. Probably in a Republic jail, but he’d live.

“What was that?”

He’d felt it too. Movement. He stood up and was nearly floored again by a sudden jerk.

“Either they’re coming for us, or the ship’s sliding into the chasm.”

“They’re coming,” Deleris said confidently.

Tarrant wondered if the rescuers would manage to cut them out without exposing them to vacuum. In future he was going to make sure there were spacesuits in the flight deck.

Wishful thinking. There wouldn’t be a future for the ship. Liberator would either hit Venus or spiral into the sun. She was far too massive for Far Horizons to shift. Their only hope was to escape her, not to save her.

Scrapes, and bangs, and more movement underfoot. It went on for a long and agonising time, hours, he thought, but no-one reached them.

Then the movement became steadier but harder and harder. Somehow Liberator was accelerating and the ship’s damping fields were out, he realised.

“Lie down” he yelled at Deleris. “Flat as you can, against the wall.” Would whoever was out there realise that g forces could crush them? He scrambled into the poor protection of a chair as the pressure built. He could hear Deleris’s breath grow harsher. Surely someone out there would work it out? He could see black round the edges of his vision now.

The acceleration stopped and he gasped for a few desperate breaths. The spin was gone. They were off Baby.

Deleris was unconscious. He did his best to clear her airways but he didn’t want to move the mess of broken ribs. When he’d done what he could he took a look at Avon, who seemed unchanged.

Only a few minutes after that he could hear noises through the main deck doorway. They went on for some time, then the doors swung abruptly open. On the other side was a temporary atmospheric tent and Blake in a space suit, with a group of people in Fleet uniform behind him. Tarrant stumbled forward into his arms.  
  


It had taken the combined efforts of sixteen Fleet ships to haul Liberator off the rock. Most of them had been full of Venusians at the time. Their return home had consequentially been a little delayed, but no-one complained. Thanks to Liberator they had homes to return to.

Baby had fallen harmlessly into the sun, its secret still intact. Avon had a bad concussion and headaches and complained bitterly about the lack of the med unit. Liberator was rebuilding itself in Earth orbit using materials generously donated by the Earth government. Deleris had five broken ribs, damage to one lung and her diaphragm and came to the medal ceremony in a wheelchair.

Tarrant wasn’t particularly worried about adding to his medal collection but he did appreciate the full Presidential pardons for him and for Blake. The media company that was working on the show about the clones had got in touch as well, suggesting, tactfully, that their roles might be enhanced a little now that they were persona grata again. And he’d got an enthusiastic personal message from Kai, sent with the boy’s parents’ approval.

“Being very bad people turns out to be extremely rewarding,” he said to Blake, as they inspected Liberator’s part-completed repairs. It was the first time that they’d been absolutely certain of not being overheard. “Maybe we should have tried it years ago.”

“I have to admit that I’m rather glad in hindsight that it all went wrong,” Blake said. “If it had been as easy as we’d planned, I’d have felt even more of a fraud. As it was you and Avon did at least risk everything to save those people.”

“And you handed yourself over to the Republic. That could have gone badly wrong.”

“it made me realise how many other peoples’ lives we risked, though. All our complacent safeguards turned out to be worthless.”

“Not quite worthless. We did stop her.” Tarrant protested. “It was just a bit more difficult than we expected. I think we should leave as soon as the ship’s capable of it. Politely, of course, but this is the Republic. If we stay too long they might remember why they stopped liking us.”  
  
"As it happens," Blake said,"I’ve been asked to speak at an opposition rally next week. I wasn't going to say anything overtly political, just a few words about remembering the Revolution."

"Don't do it," Avon said from behind them. "You might as well tear up that pardon and ask the President if he'd like to send you back to jail. Our welcome here is knife-thin. Start upsetting the authorities and they might start listening to some of those conspiracy theories already doing the rounds."

"Are there any?" Tarrant was startled and concerned

"Oh yes. Most of them are the usual anti government or mysterious aliens nonsense, but one prominent piece points out that Liberator is the only force in the galaxy powerful enough to deflect a giant asteroid towards Venus in the first place. People aren't listening at the moment, since we're being the heroes of the hour, but don't think that nobody will stumble on the truth, Our best course of action is not to give anyone who matters a reason to discredit us, so no speeches, Roj."

"It could do some good," Blake protested.

"We've done all the good we can. We've rehabilitated Roj Blake and Liberator and the Revolution with them. We've done our bit for peace, and all it's cost us is our souls."

"I didn't think you believed in souls," Tarrant said.

"I don't like hypocrisy."'Avon said. "What we did was necessary but hanging around to bask in unearned glory is neither necessary nor wise."

"But making the most of the position we're in is surely obligatory," Blake said."As you say, it's cost us enough. We've got a voice on Earth for the first time in years. There is so much good we can do with it."

"There isn't," Avon insisted. "We played with fire, we very nearly incinerated a planet, and it stops here. I'm taking my ship out in three days, when she can get out to deep space to finish repairs. You're welcome on board but I'm not coming back for you later. I intend to steer well clear of Earth from now on."

"Del." Blake said. "What do you think?"

"Avon's right. Our position is far too precarious to involve ourselves in politics now. It's time to retire properly, while no one's trying to arrest or kill us and nobody's asking awkward questions about what we just did."

He didn't add that if Blake stayed on Earth then so did he. That was not a row to start with Avon unless absolutely necessary. 

The last time Tarrant had been facing a crowd outside the Presidential Palace, they'd been baying for his death. He looked down at the waving flags and cheering faces and thought that, yes, the three of them were wise to get out now and not come back.

The President had made no attempt to get them to stay any longer, but he'had been insistent on a farewell ceremony. Blake had in turn insisted that the leader of the Freedom Party should be invited, but otherwise they'd let the Earthers arrange what they pleased. After half a day of celebration they were finally standing on the balcony, ready to go.

On a sudden impulse he reached for the hands of the two men beside him. Blake's hand squeezed back. After a moment's pause Avon's hand gripped his hard. 

"Teleport," Avon said aloud and the scene dissolved around them. Home. 

The End


End file.
